Volume 40, Number 12 · June 24, 1993
War in the Garden
By James Fenton
It begins with a piece of land, which I wish to cultivate, and which I must therefore defend, against wild beasts and against my human enemies. And so the art of gardening was linked by birth to that of war, and Cyrus of Persia was admired by Lysander for the attention that he paid to both arts, in his pairi-daeza, his paradise, his walled garden. Lysander, being a Spartan citizen, was forbidden any manual craft. He was astonished to discover that Cyrus was in the habit of setting out and planting his own trees, that he never ate without first having worked up a sweat, doing something in the line either of war or of agriculture.
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