Paradise Gardening

The first secular reference to Gardening is from the Assyrians in about 3000 BC.   Hunting parks were stocked with wild beasts for the sport of Kings and planted with every known tree.  

The Persians who over-ran Assyria were dazzled and delighted by these Parks and made their own wherever they settled.   Called Pardes (Persian for Park).    Later Pardes was translated into Greek and became Paradise.    Eventually the idea spread into Europe.

In Cumbria we have a paradise of our own in Grasmere.

"The bosom of the mountains, spreading here into a broad basin, discover in the midst of Grasmere water, its margin is hollowed into small bays with imminences, some of rock, some of turf, that half conceal and vary the figure of the little lake they command a little unsuspected paradise".

Thomas Gray (1716-1771)

 

Grasmere overlooked by Loughrigg Fell - an unsuspected paradise

Another story, with Cumbrian links, of a paradise was composed after a dream in October 1797 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).  Coleridge in ill health and staying at a lonely farmhouse near Porlock in Somerset was prescribed opium as a painkiller.  The opium had addictive and strange effects on his mind.   He was sent into a "profound sleep at least of the external senses".    In a drug induced state he experienced a dream or vision of a paradise.    The vision was triggered by a book of 17th century tales of travel and voyaging that he was reading.   He grabbed paper and ink, wrote images of the dream, described his own paradise that he named Xanadu. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived at Greta Hall, Keswick from 1800 to 1804 and then intermittently with William Wordsworth (1770-1850) from 1806 to 1810 in Grasmere.

Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea

So twice five miles of fertile ground 

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

 

The new Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) Garden currently being developed at Bridgewater, near Manchester, will have its own Paradise Garden that will sit in one half of the Inner Weston Walled Garden.    The area has the tallest walls, creating a microclimate which can grow a wide range of plants.   Designer, Tom Stuart-Smith has evoked a feeling of enclosed green spaces in which to escape the stress of the outside world - an element also seen in traditional paradise gardens.

This horticultural work of art will blend Asiatic and Mediterranean plantings and will feature glass houses along the central section of the south-facing wall.

RHS Garden Bridgewater will be the fifth RHS Garden in England and is due to open this Spring on the 11th May 2021.    The Garden will cover 154 acres and contain 25,000 plants. 

Just two hours from my home I plan many visits to this wonderful new garden.