In this semester’s course, I started by examining the meaning of the garden and posed the question of what makes it a garden as an area of study. In Jane Gillette’s canned gardens, “If people use gardens to express ideas, we need to ask what ideas need gardens to be fully and best expressed, an expression that some other medium cannot adequately achieve – like poetry, or philosophical essays, plays, landscape paintings. “
Thinking of it this way, the garden is not only part of the yard used to grow flowers and vegetables, it is also a new medium. In the garden I created, I began to think about the mediums in which a garden could exist.
Garden, gardener, philosopher
Marc Treib (1995) asks, “Must Landscapes Mean?” Wliat happens if, instead of asking, “Must Landscapes Mean?” we ask, “Can Gardens Mean?” I consider the possibility that real gardens are by definition incapable of meaning anything, or anything much, and that the strength of the garden—its ability to provide beauty and delight—lies in this very incapacity.