Some of us are fortunate enough to recognize the garden as a heavenly refuge in the midst of a chaotic world.

Lars Møller | July 31, 2026

From Wikimedia Commons: Classical Figures in an Italian Landscape (Jan Frans van Bloemen, between 1682 and 1749) 

Until I came across Monty Don on television, I had no particular interest in gardens. Showing viewers the way, he would dwell on the virtues of attention and patience, with allusions to an unspoken moral order. Through this mediation, curiously modern and faintly absurd, I entered an ancient European conversation: the garden as refuge for the troubled spirit.

From the Renaissance onwards, the European garden has been less a luxury than an argument. It argues against chaos; time; the barbarous noise of the world. In the Italian gardens that most captivate me—terraced, symmetrical, disciplined yet luminous—one encounters a paradox that lies at the heart of European humanism: the attempt to reconcile the unruly vitality of nature with the ordering intelligence of man. These gardens are not wilderness; they are not even “natural” in any naïve sense. They are assertions. They declare: here, at least, form will prevail over dissolution. Here, the human spirit refuses to be drowned in contingency. 

However, such an assertion, even at its most harmonious, carries within it a note of anxiety. Why construct such elaborate refuges if the world beyond were not felt to be intolerable? The Renaissance garden is already a retreat, a walled reprieve from political instability, religious conflict, and the grinding precariousness of life. Its fountains murmur against the silence of God; its statues, usually drawn from pagan mythology, stand as ambiguous witnesses to a cultural memory that Christianity both absorbed and displaced. One senses in these spaces something other than naïve joy: a cultivated composure—a determination to remain human in a world that persistently threatens to undo that humanity.

It is here that the Christian-humanist dimension of the garden becomes unavoidable. The garden, in European consciousness, is never far from Eden. Yet Eden is always already lost. The postlapsarian garden—the garden that we actually inhabit—is therefore an act of remembrance and of hope, but also of resignation. It acknowledges that the perfect harmony between man, nature, and God is no longer given; it must be approximated, imperfectly, through labor and care.........

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