Hesse was nine years old when his mother first entrusted him with a small flowerbed behind the family home in Calw. There he set about his task, his first encounter with the organic world, with all the seriousness of a pint-sized scientist. When flowers were in bloom, he went from one plant to another, opening some here to examine the mysteries of their vein structures, sniffing at petals there, and all the while lifting his eyes skywards to admire the clouds passing overhead like balls of woolen fluff. At this point he was not yet familiar with the Latin names for the plants he so loved—and that did not change much later in life. If one wants to be able to recognize them in the descriptions he left behind, then one needs to understand either childish jargon, his southern-German dialect, or a mixture of both. He called the grape-like red flowers of a shrub “burning love,” a windswept bush “pompous pride” and a certain red and white heart-shaped flower a “woman’s heart.”
1Memories of Hesse’s childhood garden are told in the story “Der Zyklon” (The Cyclone), in Hermann Hesse, Sämtliche Werke, 20 vols., ed. Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001–2007) [=SW], vol. 8, 69. Like most children, he disliked pastel colors. Hesse adored the vibrant colors of gladioli, the blue of the heliotrope plants or the phlox, and retained this preference for somewhat loud colors into adulthood.
He drew strength from the ideal of a simple, untouched nature, one far removed from the neoclassical image of nature with its formal paradigms, which was then en vogue; we could more align his view of nature with the ethical and aesthetic ideals of a John Ruskin or a Leo Tolstoy. To make his vision a reality, Hesse and his wife, Maria Bernoulli, settled down in a farmhouse in Gaienhofen, a small village on the shores of Lake Constance. The year was 1904. Hesse published his first novel, Peter Camenzind, which reflected in literary form his need for a more authentic and original life. The book was an extraordinary overnight success amongst younger generations of readers. That success was precisely because of the unconditional and salvaging role nature plays in it: nature here is untouched, it has high mountains and clear skies, and it resists urban depravity and the uncontrolled growth of the modern metropolis.
In Peter Camenzind there is a general, unspoken yearning for escape from a civilization—equated with modernity—that is perceived as coercive. It is a feeling many artists—from Gaugin to van Gogh—expressed long before Hesse did but which he captured in his simple, yet persuasive language. It also gave expression to the impulse around that time that led to the emergence of several small, alternative communities in Germany and Switzerland. The most famous and certainly one of the more eccentric communities was that of Monte Verità, in the canton of Ticino. The aim of those who founded it was finding an alternative way of life, rejecting the society of the time. Hesse and his wife Maria harbored a similar desire to create a small, self-sufficient little community on the fringes of the society of the time, one that could survive without being dependent on the mechanics of distributing goods and on large-scale consumerism. Arguably, this was an extraordinarily forward-looking undertaking given how it anticipated ways of thinking and feeling that would establish themselves in the decades after his death.
The little house next to the village church in Gaienhofen was surrounded by a piece of land so modest you could barely call it a garden; it was little more than a patch of land with flowers and a couple of current bushes. The following year, after the birth of his son, Hesse was able to buy a piece of land outside of the village, to build a more comfortable home and to create what was to become his first real garden. Hesse set about his garden with great zeal, planting a linden tree, a beech tree, chestnut trees and quite a few fruit trees, as well as vegetables including peas, cauliflowers, and lettuce so as to feed his small family. He also included various types of berries—raspberries and strawberries primarily, which only took up a little space but brought much pleasure. Just along the path leading to the kitchen garden, he planted flowers, principally his beloved sunflowers, but also dahlias, nasturtiums, fuchsias, hollyhocks, and carnations in the remaining spaces.
2Hermann Hesse, “Am Bodensee,” in Freude am Garten: Betrachtungen, Gedichte und Fotografien; Mit farbigen Aquarellen des Dichters, ed. and with an afterword by Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2012), 29. His favorite colors were the same as those he would go on to paint fifteen or twenty years later in his watercolors, namely, simple, unambiguous colors—shades of red and yellow most of all, the red of the dahlias, and the yellow of the sunflowers. The latter is the perfect flower for making people feel both light and lucky, whilst its seeds provide a simple, nutritious source of food.
Hesse’s love for the “cottage garden” epitomized multiple ideals simultaneously: namely that of moderate cost, that of proximity to nature avoiding anything which is either artificial or contrived, and that of expediency, expressing a preference for common and hardy plants, low-maintenance or even wildflowers.