Abstract

The paper asks whether gardens may be objects of ‘serious’ (in Ronald Hepburn's sense) and distinctive appreciation. Dismissive attitudes to the possibility of such appreciation, including Hegel's, are rejected, as is the view—Kant's, for example—that garden appreciation is ‘factorizable’ into the modes appropriate for artworks and ‘raw’ nature respectively. That view entails that there is nothing distinctive in garden appreciation. Attention then turns to the idea that it is the representational/symbolic capacities of gardens that render them objects of distinctive appreciation. That idea is criticized, but a related one, appealing to more ‘penumbral’ semantic notions like evocation, is defended. It is argued, in particular, that gardens may distinctively evoke the ‘creative receptivity’, to cite Gabriel Marcel, of human beings. Gardens, more perhaps than any other artworks, vividly testify to the dependence of their makers on what is beyond human artifice and control.