Of Gardens: An essay

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.

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.

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.

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.