Gardens as Community

In a recent post on her blog, Christine Sine asks Is this a Move of God? What she's discussing is the idea of community gardens, the way in which they help with sustainability, with learning how to feed yourself by the work of your own hands, the way in which many people feel more at home in the garden than in church, and the way in which non-church people get involved - even ask for community gardens to be set up so they can be involved. But most of all the word that stands out is community.

Read the full post for the details, but one particular detail attracted my attention and will be intriguing to older New Zealand readers of this blog. I quote:

Even our good friend Graham Kerr, once known as The Galloping Gourmet, has become involved planting his own garden and working with his church at Mt Vernon on a huge garden project. Graham tells us that he has never before cooked anything he has grown or grown anything he has cooked and it is delightful to watch him enthusiastically discover the delights of this.

If you'd ever wondered what happened to him after he vanished from our TV screens, this tells you. Six degrees - or less - of separation?

People who love gardens

In a recent Books and Culture magazine, Alan Jacobs writes on Governing and Gardening, a book review of Tim Richardson's The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden.

A quote from Jacob's review:
Classical—or more specifically Palladian—buildings like Stourhead's Pantheon were common features on the larger estates, but there were also many kinds of pseudo-temple, the aforementioned grottoes, and, increasingly as the century wore on, hermitages. Usually the hermitages would contain statues or books, but it was sometimes thought that hermitages should be inhabited. Curiously, this becomes a major theme in Tom Stoppard's magnificent 1995 play Arcadia, during which Lady Croom hires a bumbling landscape designer named Noakes, whom she comes to refer to as "Culpability" Noakes [as opposed to Culpability Brown, the famous landscaper].
When Noakes tells her that he is building a hermitage, and she inquires where he plans to get a hermit, he stammers—not having considered this point—that he could perhaps advertise in the newspaper for one. To this Lady Croom replies, "But surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence."
A wonderful scene, and we learn from Richardson that it's not wholly fictional. The Hon. Charles Hamilton, in the course of creating what would become one of the masterpieces of the age at his estate Painshill, in Surrey, actually did advertise in the newspapers for a hermit to live in his hermitage. He offered said hermit not only (a very small) room and (meager) board but the princely sum of 700 guineas—about $50,000—upon certain strict conditions: for seven years the hermit could not shave, cut his hair, trim his fingernails, or speak to anyone.
On the plus side, he would receive a hermit's cloak, a human skull, and a Bible. Hamilton got a taker soon enough, and was quite pleased until—just three weeks into the experiment—the hermit was found carousing in a nearby pub and was fired on the spot. Thus confirming the wisdom of Lady Croom's suspicions.