Every garden, irrespective of its size and surroundings, is a product of the time in which it was planted, as well as the culture that shaped that time. This applies not only to perceptions of what is beautiful, to questions of taste or even custom, but it also applies to deeper societal tendencies and notions a society has of the world and its course. We know of the connection between sacredness and nature in the ancient pre-Hellenic gardens of the Orient, the discovery of the landscape functionally subordinated to architecture in the gardens of ancient Rome, we know of religious fervor in the monastery gardens of the High Middle Ages, whereas those of the Renaissance era are known for their order and perspective, whilst the classic French gardens showed a desire for theatricality, and last, but by no means least, the re-discovery of nature in English gardens of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to the historian Pierre Grimal, the era in which each garden is created offers as many revelatory clues about the spirit and the soul as sculptures, paintings or poetry are able to do.
Whilst Hesse did not create a new style of garden, he had a deep and passionate sensibility for gardens, and dedicated much of his time and his thoughts to them. Moreover, he wrote about them frequently and in such detail that they became an essential component of his artistic personality and those of his characters.
A garden commonly represents the first intermediary between a person and nature because it offers the first opportunity to get close to nature, to get to know and to become at one with it. This was also true for Hesse, who, even as a child, felt close to nature, and who, over the course of his life, found it a constant source of inspiration, using it as a recurring theme and metaphor in his literary works as well as in his drawings and his watercolors. This connection he felt to the natural world has, of course, been thoroughly researched and evaluated. However, less has been written about how this sense of oneness with nature transformed into a love for gardens and what different forms this love took at the different stages of Hesse’s life.
Hesse witnessed the upheavals and tragic events of the century in which he lived most of his life with sympathy and shock. Consequently, as this chapter will show, his gardens reflect an individual state of mind, yet simultaneously represent an intellectual’s answer to an age filled with wars and societal upheavals, a reaction to a completely different world from the one in which he grew up. These natural yet human-crafted spaces have the poetic and symbolic value of a place of refuge, one where the recurring, cyclical rhythms of nature provide a sense of stability in the face of man-made disorder and destruction.