Philosophy for Gardeners

Explore ideas, consider the big questions and learn life lessons in your garden . Gardening is an innately thoughtful as well as practical pastime : planning ahead, imagining how plants will grow, deciding what will make a 'good' garden, wondering at the beauty of flowers and noticing how ecosystems work. This delightful and engaging collection of essays illustrate how many philosophical ideas arise naturally in gardeners’ everyday work . Growers by their nature are in fact already philosophers: existentialists who try to live and work by their own rules in a garden; stoics who put up with slug damage again and again, and try to work in harmony with nature; and practical quantum scientists who witness incredible processes going on in plant cells beneath the ground. In Philosophy for Gardeners , Kate Collyns uses aspects of gardening to introduce and explore a range of philosophical ideas and schools of thought; cultivating a greater understanding and appreciation of intriguing concepts , propagated from science, evolution and aesthetics through to politics, economics and ethics. Broken into four sections, Soil, Growth, Harvest and Cycles , each section explores questions of philosophy through the lens of the garden. A fascinating read , this book is as perfect for students of philosophy as it is for gardeners, filled with thought-provoking reflections on life, being and existence.