Discover the culture lying deep beneath our gardens - this fascinating new book will spark your imagination

The Green Fuse offers a deep and contemplative dive into the culture that lies beneath our gardens: where they come from, why we make them, and what they mean to us. It examines gardens and gardening ‘in the light of other cultural activities…the reading of books, the practice of religion(s), looking at paintings, listening closely to music… memorialising, dreaming, idealising’.

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Drawing from literature, music, philosophy, mythology and history, each chapter takes a different garden feature or a different element of garden making as its starting point – Mazes and Labyrinths; Gardens and Time; The Garden as Theatre; The Green Chapel; The Green Study; Garden Follies; The Garden of England; Gardens and Painting; Gardens and Music, and so on, ending with Peter and Pan, on the gods of the garden – and then explores their underlying scaffolding.

To give a sense of the breadth of Peter Dale’s thinking and writing, a mere chunk of the early chapter on mazes and labyrinths covers: the similarity of a maze to the human brain; Ariadne’s thread as
a link back to Theseus’s true self; the maze as metaphor for the womb (and the running races held in some to win the hands of women); the life wisdom offered by a maze (‘the shortest route is unlikely
to be the best’); the maze as a symbol of the forest as a place of confusion and fear, and the link between that and the clearing of our ancient forests.

I could go on; there is much, much more, and a poetic turn of phrase is never far away either, for instance: ‘the lavish temporariness of a maze brushed into a dewy lawn on an early morning in late August’. It is breathtaking in its scope and continually and delightfully surprising. Short ‘Interludes’ puncture the book here and there – visits to gardens that embody the topic being discussed – and these work well as breathers and changes of pace, and to bring us down to earth after our deep pondering. There are few illustrations through the book, but a smattering around these entries, and you can drift off and picture a visit to one of the gardens where the maker has had things to say about the chapter topic, follies or enclosure for instance.

The references throughout are as earthy as they are highfalutin. It is a book that stretches and feeds the mind

I’m aware that some of this could sound a little rarefied, but the references throughout are as earthy as they are highfalutin: Candide and garden gnomes, Paradise Lost and The Wind in the Willows, Bach and Sting. It is also a book that stretches and feeds the mind. It had me wanting to read more, looking at John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose in a new light, and comparing it to John Everett Millais’ Ophelia, then considering harmony and melody in the garden in the style of Christopher Lloyd, and then longing (once again) to attend one of the great set-piece garden parties of literature, perhaps Jay Gatsby’s where, as Dale quotes, ‘the men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings
and the champagne and the stars’.

It is the book of a deep thinker, and it is no surprise to discover that Peter Dale is a poet. He has clearly spent a lifetime pondering on gardens, uncovering the hidden thoughts that lurk beneath our love of them. But he is also a lecturer and writer (he has been a long-standing contributor to Hortus and has written books on culture, poetry and gardens), and he is skilled at communicating, revealing his thinking to the reader logically and leading us through his arguments with ease. He has produced an intricate, magical and deeply satisfying book that I will turn to again and again, and have no doubt I will find something new to ponder on every time I do.