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Today, we are pleased to present excerpts from Antiquity in the book “Tablets” where Amos Bronson Alcott expounds on the positive benefits of gardens on the human psyche.Book 1: Practical The Garden Antiquity“Virgil’s first wish was to be a wise man, the second to be a good husbandman. But since nature denies to most men the capacity or appetite, and fortune allows but to very few the opportunities or possibility of applying themselves wholly to wisdom, the best mixture of human affairs we can make, are the employments of a country life. It is, as Columella calls it, the nearest neighbor or next in kindred to philosophy. And Varro says the principles of it are the same which Ennius made to be the principles of all nature; earth, water, air, and the sun. There is no other sort of life that affords so many branches of praise to a panegyrist; the utility of it to a man's self, the usefulness or rather necessity of it to all the rest of mankind, the innocence, the pleasure, the antiquity, the dignity.” “Tis man’s natural position, the Paradise designed for him, and wherein he is placed originally in the Sacred Books of the cultivated peoples; their first man being conceived a gardener and countryman by inspiration as by choice.”“Civilization begins with persons, ideas; the garden and orchard showing the place of their occupants in the scale; these dotting the earth with symbols of civility wherever they ornament its face. Thus by mingling his mind with nature, and so transforming the landscape into his essence, man generates the homestead, and opens a country to civilization and the arts. In like manner, are the woods meliorated and made ours. Melancholy and morose, standing in their loneliness, we trim them into keeping with our wishes and so adopt them into our good graces, as ornaments of our estates, heraldries of our gentility.”
