WorkFrancis Bacon

Of Gardens: An essay

The essay Bacon added in old age, laying out an ideal garden month by month — the inductive philosopher turned gardener.

by Francis Bacon9 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1625(aged 64)
Original language: English

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Overview

This essay reached print only in 1625, in the enlarged final edition of Bacon's Essays, a year before his death and four years after bribery charges had ended his career in the law. It is the forty-sixth of the fifty-eight pieces, and it does something none of the others attempts. Rather than counsel a courtier, it lays out an ideal garden acre by acre and, above all, month by month, so that something is always in flower and the owner walks out into a kind of perpetual spring. Bacon wrote from ground he knew: he had planted and rebuilt the gardens at Gorhambury, his family seat in Hertfordshire. The prose moves between the practical and the moral without strain — gardening, he holds, is the purest of human pleasures and the finest refreshment of the spirits, and a prince will build a stately house before he learns to garden finely, as though the finished garden were the harder achievement. The piece has never left the anthologies, of English prose and of garden design alike.

Key concepts

When did this essay appear, and where does it sit in the Essays?

It reached print only in 1625, in the enlarged final edition of Bacon's Essays, a year before his death and four years after bribery charges ended his legal career. It is the forty-sixth of the fifty-eight pieces, one of those Bacon added late. Unlike the rest of that worldly book, it sets counsel to a courtier aside for the pleasure of describing a thing well made.

What makes the essay's design unusual?

Rather than moralize, Bacon lays out an ideal garden concretely — acre by acre and, above all, month by month. He specifies what should be in bloom through each part of the year so that the garden is never bare, producing what he calls a kind of perpetual spring. It reads as a working plan as much as an essay, which is why it has stayed in anthologies of garden design as well as of English prose.

What did Bacon draw on to write it?

He wrote from ground he actually knew. Bacon had planted and rebuilt the gardens at Gorhambury, his family seat in Hertfordshire, so the essay's confidence about soil, seasons and layout comes from a gardener's experience, not just a reader's. That firsthand practice is part of what gives the piece its unusual mix of the hands-on and the reflective.

Why does Bacon rank gardening so highly?

He calls it the purest of human pleasures and the finest refreshment of the spirits — pure because it harms no one and refreshes because it restores. To underline the point he says a prince will build a stately house before he learns to garden finely, treating the finished garden as the harder and later achievement. Gardening, for Bacon, is where cultivation of the ground and cultivation of the person meet.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The garden as the purest pleasure

What is a garden for, and why does Bacon set it above almost every other made thing? Here the worldly counsellor lays down his statecraft to design an acre planned for beauty in every season.

Alone among the fifty-eight Essays, this one counsels no courtier. Bacon lays out an ideal garden acre by acre and, month by month, so that something is always in flower and the owner walks out into a kind of perpetual spring. He wrote from ground he knew, having planted and rebuilt the gardens at Gorhambury. Gardening, he holds, is the purest of human pleasures and the finest refreshment of the spirits — and he adds that a prince will build a stately house before he learns to garden finely, as if the finished garden were the harder achievement. The prose moves between the practical and the moral without strain.

aesthetics
nature
health
simplicity
environmental design
gardens
architecture
cultivation
nature and culture
pleasure
practical wisdom

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Within this work

passages held: 9
distinct concepts: 20
by passages held, corpus-wide: #818

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “aesthetics” and “gardens”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 2 concepts, joined by 1 pairing. 16 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
aesthetics	gardens	8

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1597 The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
The book Bacon grew across three editions and thirty years, and the one that kept his name in ordinary readers' hands while his philosophy waited for a later age to take it up.
EN
1605 The Advancement of Learning
Bacon's opening move in a lifelong campaign, addressed to James I in 1605, and later rebuilt and enlarged as the Latin De Augmentis Scientiarum of 1623.
EN
1620 Novum Organum, or True Suggestions for the Interpretation of Nature
Part Two of the unfinished Instauratio Magna, and the piece of that grand design Bacon brought nearest to completion — the core of his case for a new method.
EN
1625 Of Gardens: An essay you are here EN

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