A garden is a real place imagined, and, with time and care, an imagined place made real. Patrick Lane, poet, quoted in What are Gardens For?

Making a garden is an art form. Banish from your mind the sterile broad green expanses of suburban lawns so prevalent in North America and think of true gardens. These are places that reflect the past and give hope for the future, with their eternal promise of renewal. At the same time, they gently remind us that life is fleeting. In other words, they tell us about life. They are places of refuge and places where secrets are told. They offer peace, repose and solace.

All this is done through the intervention of a "maker", who takes an undefined space and turns it into a place, one that is deliberately organized for the maker's purposes, and in the process expresses a particular view of the world. Are gardens art? According to Stuart,

...only to some extent. Works of art are human creations... but gardens are only in part the creations of human will... It was for this reason that Hegel denied that gardens were works of art. A second objection to calling gardens works of art is that they have no definite shape, since they lack a conclusion; instead, because they are dominated by time, they are in a constant state of evolution. But in so far as they are patterns of shape and colour organized in a controlled space by a human, they are, in part, works of art and thus capable of expressing meaning and personality. And in some ways it may be that the garden comes closer to what Wagner called the Gesamkunstwerk, the total artwork that involves all our senses...

Stuart feels that "we must experience the garden being visited with no less intensity and completeness than we would an opera, a novel, or a piece of scuplture". To do this, we must give ourselves up to our senses in order to see, hear, smell and feel what is happening in the garden.

Authors know this instinctively, using cultivated spaces to create the desired atmosphere. It's difficult to imagine The Monk or The Italian without their brooding descriptions of Italian landscapes, or walled cloistered gardens. As Stuart reminds us, Jane Austen used garden design to signal character, most especially that of Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, saying that when Elizabeth realized in his garden She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by awkward taste, she began to realize that there was neither pretence nor affectation about him after all. The novels of [[Henry James]] often feature gardens as backdrops to his narratives. Children's books from Peter Rabbit to The Secret Garden are filled with gardens, giving that sense of a separate little world.

Stuart believes that if the creation of a garden is a form of art, then visitors to gardens should educate themselves the same way visitors to art galleries or museums, music lovers, and readers all learn about their particular interests. Gardens have a context, reflect a particular culture, and strive to make us think. If we know enough about this background, we can read a garden as we would read a book or a musical score. Stuart is advocating knowing enough to make the leap from having an opinion as to whether or not a particular place pleases, to knowing why that is so.

Developing a critical eye in the best sense of critiquing, or reading garden critics, not only helps when visiting famous gardens, but more importantly it helps us with our own gardens. To understand how this might be so, Stuart quotes and paraphrases W H Auden on writing, who said the critic can do one or more of the following:

1. Introduce me to authors and works {we may substitute gardens} of which I was hitherto unaware. 2. Convince me that I have undervalued an author or work {garden} because I had not read them carefully enough. 3. Show me relations between works {gardens} of different ages and cultures which I would never have seen for myself because I do not know enough and never shall. 4. Give a 'reading' of a work {garden} which increases my understanding of it. 5. Throw light upon the process of artistic 'making'. 6. Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.

Using these critical tools, it only makes sense that a particular book or garden would be revisited. We've all had the experience of starting a book that just doesn't work, and setting it aside, only to pick it up later and roar right through it. So it is with gardens. The light might not have been right, the deer might have invaded the day before, frost may have wreaked havoc, but come back another time and everything is beautiful. This discussion got me thinking about some of the recent talk on LT about rereading versus going on to something new. Surely there is something to be learned both ways.

There was a lot to think about in this book that could be applied to so many art forms that I know I'll use it often. My only problem with it was that although Stuart knows gardens and garden writers well, his own writing was somewhat disjointed, leaping from thought to thought. In a way, that just made me want to read him that much more carefully.