“Let us tend our garden.” Those are the words that famously conclude Voltaire’s satirical novel “Candide.”“Candide” was the rascally Voltaire’s riposte to the philosopher Leibnitz, who insisted that because the world was created by God, and because God is good, this world of ours must necessarily be the “best of all possible worlds.”
Voltaire set out to prove Leibnitz not just wrong, but foolish, piling one (God-given?) cruelty after another upon Candide, the novel’s hapless namesake.
Some readers have since given the “let us tend our garden” phrase a political spin — live and let live. Others see it as a kind of 18th-century mindfulness technique — focus on the simplicity of the garden.
The original French, “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” is typically translated literally, “We must cultivate our garden.” But, for reasons long-forgotten, the translation I’m recalling from my college French days is, “Let us tend our garden.”
Maybe it’s because, sixty years after I last read Voltaire, “We must cultivate our garden,” feels bossy and heavy with certitude. There’s been way too much certitude flying around in cyberspace in recent years. So I’m sticking with, “Let us tend our garden.”
Yesterday was my usual writing day. But when I woke up, that gentle suggestion, let us tend our garden, came to mind, and I took it as license to play hooky from blog post writing for a day. I gave myself permission to spend the daylight hours ahead of me tending to my garden, which, on this occasion, meant shopping to replace two shrubs that had died over the summer.
And so, today, instead of words, I’m giving you photos. Photos of my day, tending my garden, which isn’t as easy as Voltaire made it out to be.
Planting a garden involves decisions, tough ones, including determining what not to let into your garden. A trip to the plant nursery is a perilous venture — so many plants, crying out to be taken home. But I held the line yesterday. I purchased two and only two plants.
More garden stuff at, “A Pollinator Garden: Putting in the Plants and Hoping for the Birds, the Bees and the Beetles.” And more about what’s growing below my yard at “Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder — But What If There’s No Beholder?”
Thank you for sharing photos of your husband & your garden. Living things & people. (Still alive in memory) If you’re like me, I regularly talk with our plants, they greet me silently but so beautifully that a smile automatically comes on my face. We trust you have a smile on your soul 💕💕💕🌈
Right now I’m smiling big time because the gardeners came over the weekend and finished the planting. A lot of plants were sitting in pots, waiting for the house to get painted. Now they’re in the ground, safe and sound. So, yeah. I’m smiling.
You had a visual adventure at the nursery. Garden looks 👌
It’s getting there! I have high hopes for next spring.