Lecture by Alan Chadwick in New Market, Virginia, 1979
Lecture 4: Man, Nature and the Garden, Part 4
An Introduction to Alan Chadwick's Lectures and a Glossary of Terms
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Obedience to natural laws. Avenue to protect the soil. The oikos. The entrance. This is an imitation of nature because animals typically follow the same path. Always blending with nature so as to conserve beauty. Hedge rows as natural fences and habitat for animals. The unknowable and imponderables in life. Limits to ownership. Partnership with nature. Vision for future. A healthy government which develops from the garden. For everything created, there is a natural control. Toadflax only grows in walls. (11:36)
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New Market, Virginia, 1979
Lecture 4, Man, Nature, and the Garden, Part 4
...you must indeed survey these matters for what nature is informing. Therefore, when you have a home, you must add to that home, out of nature, an avenue, the French simply, “to come to,” an end. And so you would plant it with trees. You would place it with stones so as not to destroy the soil. And all the animals and the carts and everything can get to the position. And again as you begin to approach the oikos-nomia, “the family in the home in the garden,” you will want an, of all things you will want, surely, entrance, “enchantment.” Oh, if you like, come down to mundanity of verbosity, it’s “entrance.” And so you suddenly have a form of pallisade in the trees and bushes of entrance. It could always be made of holly bushes, or it could be made of stone with great wrought iron gates, according to the ludicrocities of your mind. And then out of that entrance, and that avenue, you will have running into the property, your vias, your ways.
Now all of this is conservatoire. If the soil is the skin of the earth, which it is, and below the skin are the pulsations of angelic form, you will not want to destroy the procedure of that, and yet it is perfectly justifiable. Do you perceive how animals, deer and such like always go on the same path? Perhaps there is an obedience, a reverence in this matter. One would assume so. And that therefore one should make these vias that they shall not damage or destroy the earth, and that they should be traversable, and suitable. And so one notices how the animals would choose to go, upon a certain type of track, because there is stone there, or because there is a formation there. And so we follow this and copy it.
And so we develop then into our estate, our property, our garden. And this whole garden realizes an aspect of the future. It hasn’t even been dreamed of yet, largely. Oh, great artists have lived, and they produced beautiful things like all of these vias, these avenues. They’ve all been created out of man’s spiritual image. But we are nothing like within the realm of what you would call a spiritual garden, a holy garden. We’ve nothing like got there, if you like, return to Eden, which I find limiting because it always looks as though you’re going backwards into something, which I always dislike.
Now, also look then, that when you come into this establishment of the home, you again want to carry out that ordinance that is nature, that is beauty, that is entrance, You must never let go of entrance. For is not nature so exquisitely clean, does she not clean everything so miraculously? Is not everything connected with a petal of a flower, an edge of a leaf, is it not exquisite? Entrance every time. Are you not bewildered with entrance, a snowflake, a drop of water? And so, now you must look to this, even in your utmost gauche-ness of the piggery, of the cow-field. Can you possibly put up a barbed wire fence on iron posts, and paint it silver or some vile hallucinating red, which sticks out from everything and grabs the eye, and decimates it into a Mephistophelian spark?
Or can you think of getting a spade and digging a ditch so as to make drainage for that field all round, and throwing that ditch onto a bank, and on that bank placing beautiful plants like Crataygus, and Sambucus, all of those things which are relators and dis-relators to insects, that will control the area. And it will grow very thick by being cut in certain ways and pruned, that not even the most wicked-minded sheep could think of finding a way through, after a number of years, shall we say. And that therefore you will form those banks around those pastures, which you perceived up the mountain, did you not, as being ruled by little areas of gnomes and fairies? And have you not now, instead of giving a barbed wire for some cow to tear it’s udder on, have you not given a hedge for birds to nest in? Have you not created roots for a hedgehog to go to sleep in, and the little shrews and the mice and the field mice, and all the birds and insects created which are so important to the manufacture of that soil as was in the oasis, to the word fertility?
Do you think that you know comprehensively what is good for the soil? Do you think that you know comprehensively what is good for the food of a thrush? Or even comprehensively what is good for you? Are there not sides of you that cannot know what is good for you, that must be brought to you by angels and archangels and intimations? Or are you so complete that you really shouldn't be breathing? I’m [ ]. And so, I would ask you to look over this land, and you will see that you can’t own it, because it belongs to you. Because it belongs to everyone, and belongs to all of nature. And therefore are you not doing this for everyone, and all of nature? And is this not Man and the Garden and Nature?
And is this not an attitude, slightly looking down this tremendous telescope, into the future, what this garden might portend, and what it might contain, of what it might even create if you’d like to go so far as to think of it, in some incredible form of politician, who could not [ ] tell anybody anything. But would lead not only the continent that he was an embassy of, but also internationally? Perhaps this is a new entree of government: out of the garden. And is it not all there? Is it not all in the revolutionibus, in the four archangels in their performance, in the angelic plant world, which you must begin? And don’t pretend for one moment that at present you have any perception of its enormities.
For understand that there is the opposite in everything, the utter, utter opposite. If you have bread gone moldy, there is the plant... Eubatorium canabinum, will prevent mold in seed, in wheat in a granary, in bread that has gone moldy, will even purify it. Made in this world, as Dioscorides cannot but admit, Pliny, all of them… Ptolemy, Solomon. They all say the same thing: That for everything created in this world by God, there is the control and dis-control in the plant world to manifest its maintenance. For all of these flies, there is a perfect plant, they won’t go, they won’t go within five hundred yards of it. You’ve been told it over and over again, none of it means anything, you will never know it, because you don’t want to, but it is Salicifuga rasinosa. There are many, many more. There are some American ones. This plant grows in America, it’s very hardy, so high, it’s extremely beautiful, and there are many others with it.
There is this incredible little plant, Lineria cymbalaria. It’s a little Toad Flax. It can only grow on the side of a wall, like this. It can’t grow on the flat at all. It can’t even germinate on the flat. It grows in a wall in crevices. And every time it sends a leaf, which is made of little rosettes, very much like the shape of a carnation’s petals, from where that leaf comes... It’s a creeper, as it creeps along the wall, so it sends a little stalk out with a blossom. And it’s a little tiny, very translucent, mauve, moon-like bunny mouth. It has a little lip below, and often has nectar dripping from it. And it goes “phht”, to draw it back. And so this little flower grows on a stalk about so long, and has to go beyond the leaf, and so it’s out, into the huge world, looking, perceiving the revolutionibus and enjoying life out there, breathing the air, and the moon at night, and the sun by day, and the dripping water that’s keeping it perfectly happy. Suddenly this seed, by the drying up of the stalk, because the seed has dried, is pulled back, and turns inwards to the wall, and the seeds are released in the crevice...
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