Last month, I wrote about natural beauty and how we can perceive and understand it. In writing, I’ve discovered that beauty is both judged and felt—a combination of reason, emotion, and faith. In life, I’ve found that when I experience beauty, it possesses a quiet, dignified surprise.
It’s autumn in Virginia: the marvelous color show before shutting down for the winter, nature’s clearance sale before closing up shop. Because I live in a small city, my exposure to natural beauty comes from public parks and urban gardens. I love to walk through the city and witness how my fellow Richmonders create magnificence.
In this city, I see a paradox in these gardens where the natural merges with the artificial to display this magnificence, and our own human desire to capture beauty and use it for our aesthetic purposes. As Praxis Circle Contributor Sir Roger Scruton explains in Beauty,
A garden is not an open space like a landscape but a surrounding space… [a tree planted in a garden] enters into relation with the people who walk in the garden, belongs with them in a conversation. [That tree] takes its place as an extension of the human world, mediating between the built environment and the world of nature. (pages 80-81).
I have learned from Scruton that beauty is an expression of a relationship between the human and the object. Through the mechanics of human judgment—a universal human trait—we can interpret and understand this relationship. So I decided to test this notion by stepping into the “surrounding space” of one of our city’s treasures: the Japanese Garden at Maymont Park.
An In-Between World
Pathway through Japanese Gardens in Maymont Park.
I walked alone down the path. There were other visitors, but I became immersed in the garden; despite the many others enjoying the splendor of the fall day, they receded from my awareness. I was both in and with the garden.
Perhaps this is what Scruton means when he writes of the garden as “the art of between—the art of being neither art nor nature, but both,” and that in this space, we connect to some other realm of consciousness. When I stepped through that gate, I entered an in-between world.
I came to this garden seeking inspiration, but I also needed photos for this post, and these two desires created an irony. To find inspiration, I had to let the garden absorb me and let my mind drift on a swirling current of thought and feeling; yet to take a proper photo, I had to step back from that relationship, analyze the shot, and press the button on my iPhone. Another element of the in-between world: using technology amid all this natural life. I gave myself some parameters, though. I could only take ten pictures. This restriction forced me to be receptive to the garden’s beauty while remaining diligent about getting the right shot.
“The attempt to match our surroundings to ourselves and ourselves to our surroundings is arguably a human universal. And it suggests that the judgement of beauty is not just an optional addition to the repertoire of human judgements, but the unavoidable consequence of taking life seriously, and becoming truly conscious of our affairs.” (page 82)
A scenic view in Maymont Park.
In this image, water, stone, and trees combine. They represent different elements of our lives: motion and rigidity, growth and decay. As the tree swayed in the gentle breeze between the intersection of shadows and light, standing there, I felt the smallness of my individual life compared to the enormity of Life displayed before me.
This epiphany is “taking life seriously,” for to make any genuine conclusion or comprehend meaning requires sober judgment. Of course, I could have just snapped the photo and moved on, but because I didn’t, and instead paused in the shade and allowed my mind to make an aesthetic judgment, I was not only moved by the beauty of the scene—I also became conscious of how I fit in this world.
Cultivate Orderliness
To build a garden is to cultivate orderliness, and orderliness is symmetry and balance. Renaissance artists adhered to these principles, particularly the poet Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare. His poem “To Penhurst” is not the description of an actual garden, but an idealized one, an Eden before the Fall of Adam and Eve:
Then hath thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers,
Fresh as the air, and new as are the hours.
The early cherry, with the later plum,
Fig, grape, and quince, each in his time doth come;
The garden, with its natural harmony, symbolizes a social cohesion of people both who inhabit the manor house and also those who live nearby. The walls of the garden and the walls of the house create a fluid border where “farmer and clown” mix with the “lord and lady” of Penshurst. All possess equal status. In this sense, the beauty of the home and garden is not just a natural one, but one of human ideals.
Thus, this balance—cultivated and nurtured—is beauty. Because Jonson offers an ideal, we can immediately recognize that both the perfectly ripening garden outside and the flawless social equality within cannot exist in reality. Yet, because the poet offers them to us, we can recognize and aspire to what they represent.
This ideal, aspirational and imagined, is beauty. As Scruton observes below, beauty does more than please the senses—it has the profound power to shape our view of the world and orders the soul. It calls us upward, toward what is true and good. Perhaps that is why humanity’s story begins in a garden, and why, even now, we long to return to it.
