The philosopher Byung-Chul Han felt a strong need to be close to the earth, so for three years he worked in a garden which he called Bi-Won, Korean for ‘secret garden.’ For her part the architect Teresa Clara Martínez, after a year of exploring Zen gardens in Kyoto, spent a spring living in a house in the London borough of Camden Town, and used the backyard as a stimulus for reflections and drawings. These two private gardens were instruments for healing and introspection, but their approach to nature was almost antithetical: the philosopher became a gardener, digging deep with the shovel into the soil of his Berlin home, and found bodily fatigue to be a source of happiness; in contrast, the architect engaged with plants contemplatively, drew them with blue ink, and recounted her experience in lyrical short texts that her landlord, fellow architect Anthony Richardson, likens to haikus. But in both cases the garden is a source of meditation.
In Praise of the Earth is an extraordinary book, an ode which moves us to treat beauty with care and a criticism of humanity’s brutal exploitation of the planet, of the lack of scruples, and of violence. And Byung-Chul Han does this through detailed description of plants and flowers, season by season, and through an intellectual journey that leads him from Hölderlin to Heidegger, from Goethe to Novalis, and from the Schubert explained by Adorno to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which he played every day during his Mediterranean summer, a magical period that led him to Georges Moustaki and Gabriele D’Annunzio, although Rilke and Bashō continue to appear in the text with lyrical flashes. Amid his descriptions of an exceptional variety of flowers, the philosopher explains the romanticization of the world, which he associates with the color blue in its ‘supreme purity’; takes pains to make the garden bloom in winter; and concludes that each day he spends in it is a day of joy, uniting ‘cult, cultivation, and culture.’ This small great work – brief like all the writings of the Korean-born German thinker, who, incidentally, has been granted the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities 2025 for his “brilliance in interpreting the challenges of technological society” and his fertile explanations about “dehumanization, digitalization, and the isolation of people” – also benefits from Isabella Gresser’s elegant illustrations (in the splendid tradition of botanical representation), which blossom in black and white as they punctuate the narrative with their dark perfume.
Londres primavera is a light and almost elusive work with its delicate drawings and minimal annotations, rendered like a whispered diary while training in the London office of Foster+Partners. The author adds a foreword by Alberto Sanz on the English urban garden, her own urbanistic history of Camden Town since 1795, and a concise description of the making of the backyard, written by the owners of the townhouse, built in 1842, that is the book’s protagonist. Yet none of these texts is indispensable, given that the drawings and the reflections engage in silent dialogue which needs no scaffolding. In this stripping effort, the architect writes: “What folly it was to try to see twenty Zen gardens in Kyoto! I should have seen only one and returned to it over and over again, every day.” That is her opening, but it could also have been her closing.
