Among books about flowers and gardening, The Passionate Gardener is a rare and exemplary hybrid. Part essay, part handbook, part treatise, part quest, it is presented with the practiced eye of a naturalist, the disciplined understanding of a philosopher, and the inspiration of a poet. Rudolf Borchardt was, in fact, all of these, and a novelist, dramatist, and renowned translator as well. In the first six chapters he rediscovers the centrality of the garden as image, symbol, concept and metaphor in the development of human consciousness. And through a careful consideration of the flower, he describes the historical, literary, botanical, psychological, sociological and environmental perspectives of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reinvention of landscape gardening. Borchardt's intention is nothing less than to articulate the complex continuities and discontinuities through which Nature and the human being relate to one another. He perceives the flower, the human being, and the garden in which they meet to be works in progress, each an expression of the inherent possibilities of the others. The Passionate Gardener is also the story of the intrepid explorers who searched the world for new, unknown flowers; of the botanists who studied them; of the horticulturists who then refined their forms and colors; and finally of the collaboration and fusion of Roman, Persian, Oriental, Italian, French, Austrian, English, African, and American garden traditions in the service of a common, humanistic ideal. In addition, Borchardt shares his first-hand practical experience of scores of “new, lost, rare, misunderstood and singular” plants, and offers valuable guidance about soils and planting: his book is a marvelously erudite work of literature, while equally, and quite self-consciously, down to earth.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
A poet and philosopher who was "both famous and obscure" during his lifetime (1877–1945), Borchardt was also a gardening enthusiast. He was intimately involved with the contemporary German literary scene, but 19th-century ideas and ideals continued to dominate his outlook when he wrote this series of essays from self-imposed exile in Italy in 1938. In it, he explores the meaning of gardens and gardening by tracing their historical evolution from the most ancient notions of the garden as simply "a space that was marked off and protected" and "still had nothing to do with flowers" to "a symbol charged with passion" that "fulfills the dreams of two great centuries on the ruins of a third, as a legacy for a fourth, which is still unborn." Borchardt begins with a discourse on "The Flower and the Human Being," exploring the ancient origins of that relationship through mythology, legend and language. He goes on to philosophize about the different natures of wild and cultivated plants and about the relationship between plants and their native landscapes. Martin's translation captures the Germanic density and impassioned, freewheeling inquiry behind this difficult but rewarding addition to the garden reader's bookshelf. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Rudolf Borchardt was born in 1877 in Königsberg, in Eastern Prussia, and died in 1945 in the Tyrolean village of Trins, in southern Austria. Borchardt's presence in Tyrol in 1945 resulted from his forced evacuation from Italy where he had lived near Lucca since 1903, except for the period of the First World War during which he served in Berlin and Alsace as an officer in the German army. (Borchardt not only was an anti-Nazi, but as well, in earlier years, had made no secret of his family's Jewish origins: he dates his family's conversion to Evangelism to the first third of the nineteenth century, though partly it may have taken place in the 1870s.) Borchardt writes in his autobiography that the story of his life was the story of the collapse of German tradition, and he somehow shaped the desperate idea that he himself might rescue it. He was educated in archaeology, theology, and classical and oriental philology at universities in Berlin, Bonn and Göttingen, and one of the decisive turning points in his literary career was his meeting in 1898 with Stefan George and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Borchardt while alive was both famous and obscure. He was intensely involved with the ins and outs and conflicting directions of German literary life, especially in the period before the 1930s, as is seen in his copious correspondence with Hofmannsthal, Benedetto Croce and Martin Buber, among others. His thinking was always conservative—he was a part of what was known as “the conservative revolution,” though he himself preferred to write about the need for a &ldquocreative restoration” and the terms on which he looked at life, history, and literature had little to do with those of the thinking of his contemporaries. He was less in opposition to any one part of his times than indeed to the whole of them.
Borchardt's work includes poetry, drama, novellas, speeches, and several volumes of prose essays on a vast variety of subjects, in addition to Borchardt's translations, the most celebrated of which is his version of Dante's Divina Commedia, written in a personal re-invention of the Middle High-German speech which would in fact have been contemporary with Dante's Tuscan vernacular. He also translated the Homeric hymns, Pindar, Plato, Horace and Tacitus., as well as a good deal of poetry by Provence's troubadours, various nineteenth-century English poets, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Of all of Borchardt's writings, the work most frequently republished has been Der leidenschaftiche Gärtner, now at last issued in English as The Passionate Gardener.
Borchardt's work includes poetry, drama, novellas, speeches, and several volumes of prose essays on a vast variety of subjects, in addition to Borchardt's translations, the most celebrated of which is his version of Dante's Divina Commedia, written in a personal re-invention of the Middle High-German speech which would in fact have been contemporary with Dante's Tuscan vernacular. He also translated the Homeric hymns, Pindar, Plato, Horace and Tacitus., as well as a good deal of poetry by Provence's troubadours, various nineteenth-century English poets, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Of all of Borchardt's writings, the work most frequently republished has been Der leidenschaftiche Gärtner, now at last issued in English as The Passionate Gardener.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A broad-based survey of the psychological sociological and botanical roots of landscape gardening,
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Passionate Gardener (Hardcover)
Plenty of books on the market survey flowers and gardening, but THE PASSIONATE GARDENER offers something different, being a handbook and memoir from a naturalist, philosopher, and poet who is as interested in the garden as a symbol as in gardening as a talent. His discourse on flowers, botanical history, and the act of planting blends literature and science with history and offers college-level readers a broad-based survey of the psychological sociological and botanical roots of landscape gardening.Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Object of Beauty,
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This review is from: The Passionate Gardener (Hardcover)
This is by far the best "gardening" book I have ever read. It has stood the test of time and will continue to do so. A true classic. And in this edition, a wonder to behold.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A challenging but rewarding book,
By Tom Fischer (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Passionate Gardener (Hardcover)
Densely philosophical and bristling with literary and historical references, The Passionate Gardener is a gardening book like no other. Borchardt traces the development of Western gardening from its classical beginnings, and along the way provides fascinating (if rather broad) characterizations of the world's chief floristic regions. Borchardt pays gardening the compliment of treating it as a subject worthy of scholarly devotion--indeed, for him, it is one of the humanities. Although not for the casual reader, The Passionate Gardener will richly reward those who can muster the persistence and patience it demands.
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