The Two Gardens: different paths toward cultivating a sense of time and timelessness, from the past and for the future.

            In a small town, neighbors engage in friendly rivalries, what the old poet Hesiod called helpful strife. The small town in my story is no different. One couple, elderly and retired, cultivated a garden with a variety of trees, bushes, and plants. Some they planted for decoration, and others for the fruit they bore. In the spring, they greeted the crocus and the daffodil, and the blossoms of the pear, the cherry, and the apple trees in turn. The summer was a time for tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. The fall brought round a harvest of pecans and squash, and they spent afternoons watching and sweeping the colored leaves that dappled the ground. In the winter the garden rested, and the couple remained inside their house near the fire.

Their neighbor was more industrious and deliberate. He observed his neighbors tending their garden, and he considered how he could improve on their efforts. His garden, he thought, could be more splendid and more productive. He could design, with great attention to detail, a plan that would preserve the flourish of the trees and plants. To this end, he created a laboratory and a library dedicated to the science of gardens. He constructed a series of greenhouses, so that the garden retained its appearance even in the cold winter months. He installed irrigation to water his plants regularly in the heat of the summer. Striving to better his neighbors, he researched agricultural theories and practices, not confining himself only to the most recent, but exploring too the grand gardens of history. The white gardens of Seville, with their lilies, led him to arrange his plants for striking effects of color. And even greater impression afforded his reading of Marco Polo’s travels. He separated sections of his garden with elaborate stone walls, like Kublai Khan’s palace in Kaipingfu and he planted, like Ala ad-Din Muhammad, fruit trees nourished by rivulets of water. Nothing, he believed, could be left to chance or the changing fortunes of the seasons.

The scholar-scientist’s garden was a wonder to behold, so obviously perfect and timeless were its features. People visited it from far and wide, and they deemed it the garden of the future on account of its ingenious engineering. Nonetheless something grieved its designer. He worried about the insulation of the greenhouses and the cracks in the irrigation. He measured the size and number of the flowers, the yield of the fruit trees, and grew anxious when they failed to exceed the previous year’s supply. He also wondered why his neighbors seemed to ignore his success. While they nodded and waved in his direction, they kept to their own garden and did not attempt, like many others, to copy his ideas. He first dismissed them as backward and stuck in their ways, but then their indifference began to bother him.

As a result of these cares, both toward his garden and toward his neighbors, visitors noticed a change in his appearance. He seemed more tired and withdrawn, and aged more quickly with every passing year. His garden, however, maintained its timeless appearance, so that the contrast between it and its engineer became more and more obvious. “How beautiful this garden,” the visitors said. “And how sad the owner!” His neighbors, meanwhile, tended their garden according to the seasons, and the visitors to the garden next door knew what time of year it was according to the colors and growth of the plants. When the couple died in the course of time, the scientist had the opportunity to buy their land to enlarge his own, but he did not. Some people said it was out of respect for their garden, while others said he was simply too old and tired.