Stanford Professor Robert Pogue Harrison's new book, "Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition," offers a journey of the intellect to would-be garden explorers sidelined by spring's high gas prices.

In outlining the connection between gardens and Western culture, Harrison's pages discover gardens of the homeless in New York, decry the "ornamentalization" of the landscaping at Versailles and ponder the metaphor of the Garden of Eden.

Harrison's own excursion through literature and history revealed a gardening ethic of care that the garden he tends at Stanford University - that of young minds, not plant seedlings - leads him to believe is in some jeopardy.

"This gardening ethic is very much in danger these days, where the emphasis on cultivation has given way to an emphasis on consumption," says Harrison, asserting that a Stanford student would be more inclined to inspect another's backyard on HGTV than to investigate one of the many campus gardens.

"We live in a kind of frenzy of consumerism which forgets that the true source of human happiness is not in the consuming but in the cultivation, in seeing something grow, or caring for something that is not yourself. And I don't know how much we teach the young this ethic of caring for something that is not yourself. Or even caring for things such as an object or a plant. Consumption and cultivation are at war with each other.

"If I have any modest expectation for the book, it's just to try to help add to the awareness that consumerism is not a very promising formula for happiness. As Epicurus well knew."

Epicurus and his Garden School of Athens in around 306 B.C. provide such a strong foundation for Harrison's arguments that he calls Epicurus "my real hero in the book." Harrison, the Italian-born chair of the university's department of French and Italian and also host of a music-and-talk radio show on Stanford's KZSU called "Entitled Opinions" is, of course, no stranger to expressing his opinions. He talks about the personal meaning in the metaphor provided by Epicurus for teaching as it relates to gardening from the garden of his own campus cottage and while strolling through the university's nearby but little-known Kingscote Garden, an enchanting oasis of green with a 1917 apartment house tucked into it that is now used mostly to house the few students lucky enough to know about it.

"His students were learning through that activity all sorts of philosophical lessons, about how care, supervision and vigilance were crucial to maintaining this precarious balance between the forces of order, of disorder," he said.

"And so much of the Epicurean philosophy was about the cultivation of virtues like friendship, conversation, sociability, hope, gratitude, so forth. If you were going to be an Epicurean, you were going to have to devote yourself over the long term to cultivating within yourself a whole host of virtues that were as if you were self-gardening.

"I think the American campus is very reminiscent of the first academies, like Plato's academy outside of Athens, outside the walls in a garden environment, the Garden School of Epicurus, the Roman villas. The American campus typically has this garden environment that's so unusual for Europeans, and my argument in the book is that it's not at all by chance. The connection between education and gardening is like that of cultivation and self-cultivation - a very substantial link."

From Plato, Harrison learned that the student is the soil, the soul, and that the teacher/gardener has to carefully select the student/soil "who has the right aptitude or potential, whose mind is fertile, where you can plant the seeds of ideas, the seeds of truth and the seeds of virtue."

From another hero of his book, Czech author Karel Capek, Harrison concluded that he himself is not a gardener. In a little, 1929 book called "The Gardener's Year" that captivated the professor, Capek describes the obsessiveness of the "real gardener" thusly: " 'You must come to see me,' he says: 'I will show you my garden.' Then, when you go just to please him, you will find him with his rump sticking up somewhere among the perennials. 'I will come in a moment,' he shouts to you over his shoulder. 'Just wait till I have planted this rose.' " The passage goes on from there until concluding, "you go away on tiptoe, leaving his behind sticking up among the perennials."

Harrison's campus cottage's garden is an enclosure surrounded by bamboo, with three dogwood trees on one side and two Japanese maples opposite.

"I can't claim that I am someone who gardens on the weekend and has that passion, someone like Capek describes, a gardener whose waking hours are all spent worrying about his rhododendrons and his roses. It's not an obsession to me. It's something I might do more of in my retirement. I feel like I do so much gardening in a metaphorical sense, as a teacher, even as a writer. I'm always cultivating something."

"Gardens" is the third volume in what Harrison says became a trilogy for him, following "Forests" and "The Dominion of the Dead." Not his only books - he's been on the Stanford faculty 23 years now - these three are about connections with humanity.

He needn't look very far to see those. Harrison noted that the blue blossoms of the jacaranda on Stanford's quad typically emerge at about the time of graduation. And two campus gardens of diverging backstories justify both his fears about and faith in the future of care and cultivation.

One, the New Guinea Sculpture Garden, contains pathways among many intricate works by 10 master carvers who visited from Papua New Guinea in 1994. Harrison says he is alarmed at the students' apparent lack of interest in the creations as they walk through, often chatting away on cell phones.

"When you were going to college," he told his 50-year-old listener, "it would have been highly unlikely for you to walk through there and not notice, because it's not just a garden, there are sculptures and primitive art. It would be highly unusual for young people, who are naturally prone to wonder, not to wonder at it. I'm persuaded that something has shifted, that there's a certain virtualization in reality, so that we're much more attuned to what appears on a screen - either computer, television or otherwise - than we are to an actual moment itself."

The garden of hope is the nearby Kingscote Garden, built by the Howard family and now under control of the university. Its architect remains unknown. But the small garden, presided over by an old oak tree shading a lawn to the north and a small pond with a terrace opposite, has become a sort of secret treasure to the few who visit, including Harrison, who writes: "It is almost as if it didn't exist, yet once you step into it you get a sense that you are in the quietly palpitating heart of the university and that everything somehow radiates out from here."

Harrison said he rarely sees students in this garden, but on the day we visit, a young man pulls up on a bike and exclaims, "That's a peregrine falcon on the fountain!" Antonio Mora, a former student now on the university staff, draws closer, and so do we. "It is a peregrine falcon," Mora confirms. "See the spots?"

After the falcon flies off, we inspect the pond, where fat koi are swimming around goldfish. Another young staffer and former student walks up and tells us he's built structures in the pond for the protection of the fish from a blue heron who likes to eat them.

"I love coming out here every day," says Troy Battey, who lives in the apartment house. "It's meditative, it's peaceful, it's tranquil. It's like a little ... black hole maybe isn't the right term ... it's kind of like being off campus, in an imaginary land, yet still being central. It's an interesting dynamic."

As the group breaks up, Harrison walks away somewhat tickled. "I thought, wow, after my little spiel about how students don't see any more, and then there he is saying isn't that a peregrine falcon, and didn't that just prove my point was a bunch of bull-? They seem to see very well after all. I think he's an exception though."

It is the exception, however, that will ultimately massage the conclusion of concern in "Gardens," that cycle of consumption and passivity that precludes cultivation and care. Said Harrison, "What I'm proposing is not general solution or redemption, but where you find the inferno, where you find hell, you open up a little space in the garden and cultivate that, and that's already something.

"That's where the community gardens are so emblematic of this effort to create a little pocket of Eden in the middle of hell. I think every garden is a little bit that."

Read more

Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition by Robert Pogue Harrison was officially released Monday but has been on area bookstore shelves for a few weeks. University of Chicago Press; $24; 248 pages.

For a Stanford Daily article on Kingscote, go to