Garden

garden is a plot of ground enclosed and cultivated for plants, fruit, or pleasure. The Hebrew gan comes from a verb meaning "to defend," and the Greek kēpos names the same fenced and tended ground; both words assume a boundary and a keeper. Read quickly, the garden of scripture is Eden, lost at the beginning and promised again at the end. Yet the prophets and evangelists plant gardens throughout the story between, in the soul, in exile, in Israel's history, and at the tomb of Christ.

The Enclosed Garden and the Watered Garden

The poets and prophets of Israel make the garden an image of a person, first guarded and then given away.

In the Song of Songs the bridegroom says of his beloved, "A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates," and she answers by calling on the winds to "blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out" (Song of Solomon 4:12-13, 16). The word rendered "orchard" is pardes, a Persian loanword for a walled park, and its Greek form, paradeisos, is the word the Septuagint uses for the garden of Eden. It is significant that the sealed garden asks for its fragrance to be carried out. Isaiah turns the image outward. To those who "draw out [their] soul to the hungry," the Lord promises, "thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not" (Isaiah 58:10-11). In this prophecy the garden is the person who feeds others.

Planting Gardens in Babylon

Jeremiah's letter to the exiles makes gardening an act of faith in a foreign land, and the same act now reaches toward other worlds.

To the captives in Babylon, whom false prophets had promised a quick return, Jeremiah wrote, "Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them" (Jeremiah 29:5). To plant a garden is to expect to stay for the harvest. Mormon transhumanists speak of bringing whole ecosystems to build new earths, and any such settlement will begin as an exile's garden that must feed its people and renew their air. The difficulty showed in the Arizona desert, where in 1991 eight people sealed themselves inside Biosphere 2 for a planned two years. Within sixteen months its oxygen had fallen from about 21 percent to 14, and oxygen had to be pumped in. Soil microbes had consumed the missing oxygen, and the concrete had absorbed the carbon dioxide they released. A garden sealed off from the earth must do unaided everything the earth does for gardens, and its designers had not yet learned all that this required.

The Lord of the Vineyard

The longest parable in the Book of Mormon portrays God as a gardener who prunes, digs, grafts, and grieves over his trees.

In the allegory of the prophet Zenos, quoted by Jacob, the house of Israel is a tame olive tree in a vineyard. When it begins to decay, its master prunes it, digs about it, grafts in wild branches, and hides its natural branches in distant parts of the vineyard. Commentators have shown that the allegory follows ancient olive culture closely, and it dwells just as closely on the gardener's grief. When the fruit turns bad, "the Lord of the vineyard wept, and said unto the servant: What could I have done more for my vineyard?" (Jacob 5:41). Grafting, joining a branch of one tree to the root of another, is a horticultural technique, and the God of the allegory uses it freely to save his trees. Latter-day Saints read the last season of the allegory as their own dispensation, in which "the servants did go and labor with their mights; and the Lord of the vineyard labored also with them" (Jacob 5:72).

Gethsemane and the Garden Tomb

John's Gospel places both the suffering and the resurrection of Jesus in gardens, and the risen Christ is first mistaken for a gardener.

Only John calls the place of the arrest a garden: Jesus "went forth with his disciples over the brook Cedron, where was a garden, into the which he entered" (John 18:1). Matthew and Mark name it Gethsemane, from Aramaic words for an oil press, and Latter-day Saints, who locate much of the Atonement there, have long likened the crushing of olives to the Savior's suffering. Read beside the allegory of Zenos, the scene shows the Lord who labored over his olive trees pressed in an olive garden. John adds that "in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre," and on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene, weeping at the empty tomb, did not know the risen Jesus, "supposing him to be the gardener" (John 19:41; 20:15). John's word, kēpouros, "garden-keeper," appears nowhere else in the New Testament. The first man had been set in a garden to keep it, and commentators since late antiquity have seen a second Adam here, standing in a garden on the first day of a new creation. Mary knew him when he called her by name.

See also: Eden, Grow, Nature/Natural, Rewilding, Solarpunk