College Record 2019

towards the Gandy Quad, gives an additional vista to my walk, though I should like to see
the fountain at work, to complete its Islamic feel. When I sit on the bench under the tree, the
delightful and soothing sound of trickling water would add to the experience.
My subject is the study of religions, and I once taught a course on flowers and religious
traditions for which I enjoyed using as a core text the Cambridge anthropologist Jack
Goody’s wonderful and wide-ranging book The Culture of Flowers (1993). Research for the
course covered the visual arts as well as poetry; the history and symbolism of Japanese Zen
gardens; lotuses and roses, lilies and tulips. While I was writing this piece, I remembered a
passage from Annemarie Schimmel’s famous Mystical Dimensions of Islam (1975):
‘Every flower in the garden becomes, for the mystic poets of the late twelfth century, a
tongue to praise God; every leaf and petal is a book in which God’s wisdom can be read,
if a man (sic) will only look. God has put signs on the horizon and in man’s soul (Sura 41:
53); man has only to look at them. The lily praises God, silently, with ten tongues; the violet
sits modestly in its dark blue Sufi garb, its head on the ‘knee of meditation’. Red tulips with
their dark scars in their ‘hearts’ may grow out of the burned hearts of lovers, or they may
remind the mystic of black-hearted hypocrites. The narcissus looks, with languid eyes, toward
the creator or makes the lover think of the friend’s half-closed eyes, and the purple curly
hyacinth resembles the tresses of the beloved ... the eye of the mystic who is enraptured
in love sees traces of eternal beauty everywhere and listens to the mute eloquence of
everything created.’ (pp. 308–9)
Thank you, Wolfson, and your gardeners, for this enhancement of your site and the joy it
brings me. Let me acknowledge, in Kipling’s words, that ‘gardens are not made by singing “Oh
how beautiful!” and sitting in the shade’; and that ‘the Glory of the Garden it abideth not in
words.’
MEMORIES OF WOLFSON
‘The Glory of The Garden’
was first published in
1911 in A School History of
England by C. R. L. Fletcher
and Rudyard Kipling
Newly planted formal Garden. Photo: Mel Constantino.
WOLFSON.OX.AC.UK
105