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Milton’s Wild Garden
by John R. Knott
W
HEN I published Milton’s Pastoral Vision a little over thirty
years ago, I was taken by the subtlety with which Milton had
reinterpreted the rich literary tradition of the earthly paradise in representing the Garden of Eden, incorporating the rhetorical
tropes by which poets had established an ideal landscape (a stream,
flowers, shade trees, fragrant breezes, birdsong) and conventional features of the earthly paradise going back at least to Ovid (eternal spring,
thornless roses, simultaneous flowers, and fruit) and blending them into
a fluid, dynamic, joyous natural world.1 And I noted the way that the life
of Adam and Eve, at least in some aspects, embodied a sense of timeless ease associated with pastoral poetry, what Virgil called otium. Their
‘‘happy rural seat of various view’’ (.) has the look of an English
Arcadia, with a pleasing alternation of hill and valley, sun and shade,
and ‘‘Flocks / Grazing the tender herb’’ (.–).2 With its flowery
banks, shady bowers, and alleys of stately trees that afford ‘‘pleasant
walks,’’ the Garden offers variety and sensuous delight within the context of what appears an ordered, knowable place where, as Northrop
Frye once said, we cannot lose our way.3 As I think about Milton’s Eden
now, however, I am more struck by his emphasis on its wilder aspects,
apparent in his insistence that the natural world in which Adam and Eve
find themselves is fundamentally untamed, ‘‘Wild above Rule or Art’’
(.).
Some critics have found the influence of the English countryside in
Milton’s Eden or have seen it as anticipating the English landscape garden that came into its own in the eighteenth century.4 Others have ar1 John R. Knott, Milton’s Pastoral Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
2 Quotations from Paradise Lost are taken from John Milton: Complete Poems and Major
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Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, ).
3 Frye, The Return of Eden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), .
4 Helen Gardner, A Reading of ‘‘Paradise Lost’’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), .

©  The University of North Carolina Press
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gued that Milton was recalling the great Italian Renaissance gardens
that he saw in his travels, with their variety of landscape features and
their informal plantings and boschetti (wild woods).5 Visual analogues
for many of the scenes Milton renders have been found in the art of
the period.6 Landscapes of the sort that I have been describing—the English countryside, the Italian garden—are of course shaped by human
presence. They offer versions of what we could call a middle landscape,
following Leo Marx, something between the apparent disorderliness of
wilderness and the extremely structured, built environment of a city.7
Such open, varied, and patterned landscapes continue to appeal to us:
in the fields and woods and stone walls of the New England countryside, among other places, and in the pastoral settings of much classic
children’s literature. We are comfortable with them because we know
how to read such landscapes and have no difficulty placing ourselves
in them. In the Eden of Paradise Lost, they suggest a world in which
Adam and Eve experience not only delight, but also a sense of security,
shadowed only by Raphael’s warning that they must ‘‘stand fast’’ (.)
against some future temptation to disobey God’s one command not to
eat the fruit of the Tree of Life.
Milton’s Garden has other, more exotic aspects that make us recognize it as a version of the earthly paradise and not simply a Christianized Arcadia. It offers trees, fruits, and flowers of all kinds, fragrances
beyond our normal experience, and growth more luxuriant than one
would expect to find. The remarkable fertility and what Arnold Stein
called the ‘‘authorized excess’’ of the Garden have long been recognized
and have been seen as evidence of an abundance and vitality that distinguish Milton’s version of paradise.8 Other earthly paradises have all the
conventional features but not this sense of teeming growth. In his initial
presentation of the Garden, seen as Satan first views it, Milton describes
brooks that water ‘‘[f]low’rs worthy of Paradise, which not nice Art / In
Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boon / Pour’d forth profuse on Hill
and Dale and Plain’’ (.–). The phrase ‘‘Pour’d forth profuse,’’ set
against the fastidious art of the contemporary gardener, an art of tidy
beds and elaborate knot gardens, conveys the fluidity and the sense of
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5 John Dixon Hunt, ‘‘Milton and the Making of the English Landscape Garden,’’ Milton
Studies  (): –.
6 Roland Mushat Frye, Milton’s Imagination and the Visual Arts (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, ), chapters  and .
7 Marx, The Machine and the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, ).
8 Stein, Answerable Style (Seattle: University of Washington Press, ), .
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an inexhaustible richness that characterizes nature in Milton’s garden,
something we are meant to regard with ‘‘wonder,’’ as we are told Satan
does.
Another passage shows even more dramatically what it means to
enter Milton’s paradise and raises questions that I want to take some
time to explore. This is the account of Raphael’s approach to Adam
and Eve after he descends to earth in his role of heavenly messenger.
Milton shows him passing through the camp of angels keeping protective watch and into paradise itself:
Thir glittering Tents he pass’d, and now is come
Into the blissful field, through Groves of Myrrh,
And flow’ring Odors, Cassia, Nard, and Balm;
A Wilderness of sweets; for Nature here
Wanton’d as in her prime, and play’d at will
Her Virgin Fancies, pouring forth more sweet,
Wild above Rule or Art, enormous bliss.
(.–)
Milton represents a liminal moment here, a boundary crossing into a
place where an extravagant fragrance suggests a condition of bliss too
great to be contained, or to be engendered by any of our restructurings
of nature: ‘‘enormous’’ bliss, ‘‘Wild above Rule or Art,’’ as if challenging our efforts to order or even to comprehend it. Whatever order exists
in the Garden, whether in the larger pastoral landscape or in the more
intimate spaces tended by Adam and Eve, coexists with this sense of an
unrestricted, virginal nature playing out its own fancies independent
of any human (or angelic) presence. Nature in this aspect delights by its
excess, by its dynamic tendency to overrun limits.
Another passage can serve to illustrate the other major way in which
we see the wildness of Milton’s garden: from the perspective of those
who live there. This comes from Eve’s argument to Adam in book  in
favor of working alone, in the professed interest of more efficient gardening:
what we by day
Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind,
One night or two with wanton growth derides
Tending to wild.
(.–)
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All gardens tend ‘‘to wild,’’ as any gardener knows, but this one possesses an extraordinary fertility; its growth is ‘‘wanton,’’ which here
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carries the older meaning of profuse or rank. This does not mean weedy
in our sense. There are no weeds in paradise, only in the fallen world
we inhabit, and perhaps even there only in the eye of the beholder (if
a weed is simply a flower in the wrong place). Some excellent critical
commentary has been written about the interplay of wildness and order
in Milton’s garden, by Isabel Gamble MacCaffrey and Barbara Lewalski
among others, but I am not convinced that this sufficiently accounts for
the meaning and force that Milton gives to wildness, which is usually
understood simply as an encroaching disorder.9 So I want to ask again
what we should make of the wild aspect of Milton’s garden, and how
recognizing the character and effect of this wildness might alter our perception of the life of Adam and Eve, at least of their work as gardeners.
We may not realize how unusual it was for Milton to give positive
connotations to words such as ‘‘wild’’ and ‘‘wilderness,’’ conditioned as
we are by a society that increasingly values wilderness and can even
talk about a wilderness ethic. We may forget that we owe our positive
sense of wilderness to a major shift in sensibility that came about in the
nineteenth century.Thomas Cole and his successors among the painters
of the Hudson River School established American wilderness scenes as
a legitimate subject for landscape painting and cultivated a sense of the
wilderness sublime. A succession of writers, most notably Henry David
Thoreau and John Muir, explored and celebrated the value of wild nature. Thoreau casts the longest shadow—the Thoreau who could say,
‘‘Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure,’’ and,
most memorably, ‘‘In Wildness is the preservation of the World.’’ 10
When Milton wrote, wild and wilderness usually carried negative connotations, the sort one can see in William Bradford’s famous characterization (in ) of the New England found by the first colonists:
‘‘what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of
wild beasts and wild men.’’ 11 In the next century, Samuel Johnson could
define wilderness as ‘‘[a] desert; a tract of solitude and savageness.’’ Old
Testament prophets had familiarized the sense of wilderness as a desolate and hostile place. Isaiah . promises that God will make Zion’s
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9 MacCaffrey, ‘‘Paradise Lost’’ as Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
), –; Lewalski, ‘‘Innocence and Experience in Milton’s Eden,’’ in New Essays on
Paradise Lost, ed. Thomas Kranidas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, ), –.
10 Thoreau, ‘‘Walking,’’ in The Natural History Essays, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer (Salt Lake
City: Peregrine Smith, ), –.
11 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (New York: Random House, ), .
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wilderness ‘‘like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord,’’ and
the colonists saw themselves as new Israelites creating gardens in the
wilderness of New England. When wilderness was not seen as desert, it
was imagined as the dark forest, a disorderly place where we can easily
lose our way and are likely to be threatened by wild beasts, outlaws, or
savages, even demons. Given this context, it is startling to find Milton
making the zone through which Raphael enters paradise ‘‘a Wilderness
of sweets.’’ By the mid-seventeenth century, gardeners had begun to use
the term wilderness to refer to a planting of trees ‘‘laid out in . . . [a]
fantastic style, often in the form of a maze’’; the term could also refer
to a confused array of things.12 Wilderness, then, had begun to acquire
other senses besides the primary one. Whatever sense or senses of the
word Milton may have had in mind, his phrase ‘‘a Wilderness of sweets’’
implies an unexpected and potentially disorienting profusion of fragrances, if not for an archangel at least for the reader unused to imagining a natural world that transcends ordinary experience. To suggest the
‘‘enormous bliss’’ possible in an unfallen world, where nature ‘‘[wantons] as in her prime,’’ Milton challenges us to relax our expectations
of order and control and enter a wilderness of pleasurable sensations,
as if entering an unknown territory of experience. Wild nature, in his
‘‘delicious Paradise’’ (.), promises pleasures that would seem excessive in any other context. Milton shows Satan tantalized and ultimately
frustrated by encountering fragrant breezes and ‘‘pure now purer air’’
(.) in his initial approach to the Garden. In Raphael’s approach, the
transition is even more clearly marked, by an emphasis on sensations
so rich they can bewilder.
Milton’s more conventional uses of wilderness and wildness in Paradise Lost make the positive senses he gives the wildness of nature in
the Garden more striking. When Satan approaches the hill at the top
of which paradise is found, he encounters ‘‘a steep wilderness, whose
hairy sides / With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, / Access
deni’d’’ (.–). Such wildness seems a distortion of the natural order
(‘‘grotesque’’). Satan can simply leap over this barrier and the ‘‘verdurous wall’’ (.) that rises above it, of course, but the experience of
encountering such a forbidding, tangled ‘‘wilderness’’ makes the protected world of the Garden with its open vistas and ‘‘pleasant walks’’
seem more marvelous, for the reader as well as for Satan (.). Milton
later signals the transformation of Adam’s attitude toward the Garden
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12 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘‘wilderness.’’
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when he realizes that Eve has eaten the forbidden fruit by having him
exclaim: ‘‘How can I live without thee . . . in these wild Woods forlorn?’’
(.–). Nothing has changed yet in the physical nature of the Garden, but Adam suddenly perceives it as ‘‘wild Woods,’’ instantly experiencing a sense of dislocation which is a consequence of his new sense
of impending alienation from God. Both the woods and Adam appear
‘‘forlorn,’’ abandoned by God, as Adam’s mood changes. Later, when
Adam has eaten the fruit himself and awakened from a new kind of
sexual encounter with Eve driven for the first time by lust, his instinct is
to withdraw in shame to the deep shade of the woods, where he might
hide from God and ‘‘[i]n solitude live savage’’ (.). After he and Eve
improvise garments from fig leaves to cover their nakedness, Milton
compares them with the New World natives found by Columbus: ‘‘With
feather’d Cincture, naked else and wild / Among the Trees’’ (.–).
Suddenly we see them as if through the eyes of European colonizers of
America, as literal savages comparable to Bradford’s wild men in a wild
wood.13
In the postlapsarian world of Paradise Lost, nature becomes wild in
the sense of being inhospitable and confusing. As the Garden is physically transformed by the coming of ‘‘pinching cold and scorching heat’’
(.) as well as damaging winds, it loses its paradisal qualities altogether. Michael’s prediction of the future that Adam’s descendants
can expect reflects the New Testament view of the world as a wilderness
in which we are ‘‘strangers and pilgrims,’’ in the language of Hebrews
(.). His promise is that Jesus will conquer the ‘‘adversary Serpent,
and bring back / Through the world’s wilderness long wander’d man /
Safe to eternal Paradise of rest’’ (.–).The physical paradise is displaced to an apocalyptic future in which the faithful can find bliss in
heaven or earth, ‘‘for then the Earth / Shall all be Paradise, far happier
place / Than this of Eden, and far happier days’’ (.–).
Versions of the earthly paradise reappear in accounts of the New
World, and I want to mention one of these to show the persistence of
the ideal and also of a tension between wildness and the human need
for order that one sees in Milton’s Garden. My example is from John
James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, published in five volumes in
the s as a companion to his Birds of America. In the following pas-
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13 J. Martin Evans develops this comparison in Milton’s Imperial Epic (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, ) in the course of a larger argument about the influence of accounts
of the New World on Paradise Lost. See especially –.
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sage, Audubon is describing the habitat of the mockingbird in Louisiana:
It is where the Great Magnolia shoots up its majestic trunk, crowned with evergreen leaves, and decorated with a thousand beautiful flowers, that perfume the
air around; where the forests and fields are adorned with blossoms of every hue;
where the Golden Orange ornaments the gardens and groves: where Bignonias
of various kinds interlace their climbing stems around the White-flowered
Stuartia, and mounting still higher, cover the summits of the lofty trees around,
accompanied with innumerable Vines, that here and there festoon the dense
foliage of the magnificent woods, lending to the vernal breeze a slight portion
of the perfume of their clustered flowers; where a genial warmth seldom forsakes the atmosphere, where berries and fruits of all descriptions are met with
at every step.14
Unlike Milton, Audubon grounded his description in observation of an
actual landscape, but this takes on attributes of an earthly paradise with
its fragrance, vernal breeze, simultaneous flowers and fruit, and sense of
infinite variety (‘‘blossoms of every hue’’). Audubon’s eye orders what
could be seen as unruly. He describes flowering vines as festooning
the trees and suggests a pleasing alternation of forest and field, garden
and grove, making these forests seem inviting ones that we could walk
through with ease, meeting natural wonders ‘‘at every step,’’ rather than
a tangle of subtropical growth. Audubon clearly needed to find a kind
of order in this natural scene, even as he celebrated its wildness.15
Audubon would have known William Bartram’s descriptions of the
paradisal luxuriance he found in Florida and also Chateaubriand’s rendering of Louisiana (in his popular romance Atala) as a scene of primal nature, a ‘‘New Eden’’ in which ‘‘trees of every form and every
colour and every odour mingle.’’ 16 The expected response to scenes of
unspoiled nature for such writers was wonder, or what they frequently
call ‘‘enchantment.’’ Satan’s wonder at his first glimpse of the Garden
prefigures this response, although wonder in his case is mingled with
envy and a resolve to destroy what he can’t possess. Stephen Greenblatt
has seen expressions of wonder in Renaissance accounts of the New
World as a form of appropriation, what he calls ‘‘a record of the coloniz14 Audubon, Ornithological Biography,  vols. (Edinburgh, –) :.
15 I consider Audubon’s rendering of seemingly pristine or paradisal landscapes at
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greater length in Imagining Wild America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ),
chap. .
16 Bartram, Travels (New York: Viking Penguin, ); Francois René de Chateaubriand, Atala and René, trans. Rayner Heppenstall (London: Oxford University Press,
), .
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ing of the marvelous.’’ 17 I find more than this in the wonder I have been
describing in Audubon, and in Bartram as well. Such wonder seems to
manifest another kind of human yearning, a desire to experience an alluring and seemingly pristine natural world that suggested to them the
splendor of creation. In Audubon, such yearning is frequently colored
by nostalgia for landscapes he perceived as transfigured by waves of
settlement, or about to be, like the Ohio River valley he knew from his
early trips down the river to Kentucky. There is a different but related
kind of nostalgia in Milton’s immensely evocative rendering of Eden,
more evocative because he presents it from the beginning as doomed
by Satan. I would agree with J. Martin Evans, who sees Milton as anticipating the Romantic view of nature as wild and diverse.18 The key
difference is that Milton identifies the pristine natural world, in its wild
luxuriance, with a lost ideal of bliss associated with innocence. Such
wildness exists only for those innocent of sin, in the enclosed paradise
that embodies this innocence, although Milton’s account of creation
also suggests the energy and abundance of the whole natural world:
‘‘Forth flourish’d thick the clus’tring Vine’’ (.), ‘‘last / Rose as in
Dance the stately Trees, and spread / Thir branches hung with copious
Fruit’’ (.–).
The fact that Milton emphasized the role of Adam and Eve as gardeners, concerned with keeping luxuriant growth in check, may seem
to contradict the emphasis on the joys of a nature that ‘‘[wantons] as
in her prime’’ that I have been describing. As is commonly recognized,
Milton developed their roles as gardeners to a much greater degree than
did his predecessors. Critics have explained this apparent contradiction
as tension between a fecund nature that tends ‘‘to wild’’ and the efforts
of Adam and Eve to preserve the kind of order represented by spaces
suited to human occupation: paths, arbors, specially tended areas, and
the nuptial bower, which Milton describes as ‘‘sacred and sequester’d’’
(.).19 This seems to me a useful explanation of why we perceive the
Garden as a dynamic and yet an ordered place, but I wonder whether
it pays enough attention to Milton’s representation of the problems of
trying to garden in paradise and their implications.
As I have suggested, Milton’s Garden has an inherent order established by God, the creator of the larger pastoral landscape, with its pat17 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), .
18 Evans, ‘‘Paradise Lost’’ and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), –
.
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19 See, for example, Lewalski, ‘‘Innocence and Experience,’’ ff.
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terned variety, and also of the paths and arbors that Adam and Eve
maintain. This is a place intended for human occupants: ‘‘This Paradise
I give thee’’ (.), God tells Adam. Milton presents the nuptial bower
as an example of how God ‘‘fram’d / All things to man’s delightful use’’
(.–), with trees and flowering shrubs forming a natural ‘‘Mosaic’’
(.) and violets, crocuses, and hyacinths underfoot creating a ‘‘rich
inlay’’ (.). Nature does not seem potentially unruly here. The point
of this description seems to be to illustrate the superiority of divine artistry over subsequent human efforts (such as inlays of stone and metal).
Nature appears in different aspects according to Milton’s emphases;
it would be difficult to map any of his landscapes in Paradise Lost, including that of the Garden, because they appear to shift with these emphases. In describing the nuptial bower, Milton emphasizes the beauty
of an intricate and relatively stable natural order. Elsewhere in the Garden, the ‘‘luxuriant’’ vine and other ‘‘wanton growth’’ require attention
if Adam and Eve are to maintain their spaces. They must work, in other
words, but this is ‘‘sweet Gard’ning labor’’ that serves to order their day
and to make ‘‘ease / More easy’’ (.–); work becomes arduous only
after the Fall. Such gardening labor ‘‘declares [their] Dignity’’ (.), as
Adam tells Eve, distinguishing them from the animals, and it also allows
Milton to give Eve a special role as what amounts to master gardener.
She is more sensitive than Adam is to the flowers, which she names and
tends with nurturing care, and she seems to have her favorite gardening spots, like the one in which Satan finds her working alone on the
day of the Fall. The critical tendency to characterize the labor of Adam
and Eve as georgic has served as a way of enhancing its importance, for
example, by emphasizing its simplicity and dignity and by showing its
continuity with labor in the postlapsarian world and thus suggesting
that the arts of civilization have a place in paradise.20
Together, Adam and Eve practice a kind of gardening that would have
been recognizable to Milton’s contemporaries.21 They prune fruit trees,
prop up flowers, and train vines on trees and arbors, acting on God’s
instructions to Adam to ‘‘Till and keep’’ paradise. In elaborating on the
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20 See Stella Revard, ‘‘Vergil’s Georgics and Paradise Lost: Nature and Human Nature in
a Landscape,’’ in Vergil at , ed. John A. Bernard (New York: AMS Press, ); Anthony
Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); Barbara Lewalski, ‘‘Paradise Lost’’ and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
); Diane Kelsey McColley, A Gust for Paradise (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
).
21 See Charlotte Otten, ‘‘‘My Native Element’: Milton’s Paradise and English Gardens,’’
Milton Studies  (): –, on contemporary gardening practices reflected in Paradise
Lost.
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biblical injunction to ‘‘dress’’ and ‘‘keep’’ the Garden (Gen. .), Milton
inevitably committed himself to a language that implies the necessity of
control, with adjectives such as ‘‘overwoody’’ (.) and ‘‘overgrown’’
(.). One could say that this is a problematic language to use of a
place in which the profusion of nature is celebrated as good and delightful or, more broadly, that developing the implications of gardening in
such a place is inherently problematic. Yet I think that one can explain
such apparent difficulties and appreciate Milton’s handling of them by
focusing on the ways in which Adam and Eve interpret their roles as
gardeners.
If Milton makes us see the gardening of Adam and Eve as a natural and fitting activity ordained by God, he also causes us to wonder
how successful it can be. Nature in the Garden grows ‘‘Luxurious by
restraint’’ (.), Eve observes, in the same speech in which she argues
that she and Adam can work more efficiently if they separate. Milton
shows Adam and Eve pursuing their labor in a natural setting so large
and so fertile that one has to question how they can make any real headway, even with the prospective help of ‘‘younger hands’’ (.) that
they invoke on several occasions. At one point, they praise God for ‘‘this
delicious place / For us too large, where thy abundance wants / Partakers, and uncropt falls to the ground’’ (.–). They cannot hope to
‘‘dress’’ and ‘‘keep’’ a Garden so large and so irrepressibly fertile in the
sense of wholly domesticating or controlling it. We are told that ‘‘much
thir work outgrew / The hands’ dispatch of two Gard’ning so wide’’
(.–). As Milton represents their gardening, the activity itself, the
process, seems more important than its results. In addition to giving
shape and purpose to their daily lives, gardening can become emblematic for Milton. As Adam and Eve ‘‘led the Vine / To wed her Elm,’’ we
are told, so Eve ‘‘spous’d about him twines / Her marriageable arms’’
(.–). Following Augustine’s allegorizing of the biblical command
to dress and keep the Garden, Barbara Lewalski interprets the gardening of Adam and Eve as an emblem of moral control, suggesting the
need to prune the affections.22
What I find most interesting about the work of Adam and Eve as gardeners, however, apart from the delight and instruction they find in this
work, is its apparent ineffectiveness. Adam shows some awareness of
this, even as he tells Eve that they need to go to bed to be ready to get
up before dawn to resume their work:
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22 Lewalski, ‘‘Innocence and Experience,’’ ff. See also Lewalski, Rhetoric of Literary
Forms, –.
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
Milton’s Wild Garden
Tomorrow ere fresh Morning streak the East
With first approach of light, we must be ris’n,
And at our pleasant labor, to reform
Yon flow’ry Arbors, yonder Alleys green,
Our walk at noon, with branches overgrown,
That mock our scant manuring, and require
More hands than ours to lop thir wanton growth:
Those Blossoms also, and those dropping Gums,
That lie bestrown unsightly and unsmooth,
Ask riddance, if we mean to tread with ease.
(.–)
Adam’s ‘‘unsightly’’ reveals an innate aesthetic preference for well-kept
paths, free of the debris that naturally litters them, whereas ‘‘unsmooth’’
suggests a practical concern with keeping these paths clear of obstructions. He describes ‘‘wanton growth’’ that forever needs lopping with
gardening tools that Milton describes as formed by ‘‘rude’’ art, ‘‘Guiltless of fire’’ (., ). Showing Adam preoccupied with ‘‘unsightly’’
paths entails a certain artistic risk, inherent in using the heightened
style of epic to render domestic subjects. Our ‘‘general Ancestor’’ (.)
can begin to sound like our next door neighbor. The point of taking the
risk, I believe, is to show that the gardening labor of Adam and Eve cannot begin to control the wild nature around them, for all the importance
of this labor for giving rhythm and meaning to their daily lives and for
engaging them in an exchange with a vital natural world that affirms
their harmony with it as well as affording them pleasure.
Milton has Raphael paraphrase for Adam God’s charge to newly created man in Genesis (.) to subdue the earth and take dominion over
every living thing, and we first see Adam and Eve, through Satan’s eyes,
as ‘‘Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,’’ who ‘‘In naked Majesty
seem’d Lords of all’’ (., ). Yet if Milton follows biblical authority
and interpretive tradition in asserting their lordship over the natural
world, thus establishing their place in the hierarchy of Creation, he does
not seem to have been interested in showing them subduing the rampant vegetation of the Garden. Adam describes this as mocking their
‘‘scant manuring’’ (managing), Eve as deriding their lopping and propping and pruning and binding in a night or two of ‘‘wanton growth.’’
By introducing such strong words (‘‘mock,’’ ‘‘derides’’), Milton suggests
both the irrepressible dynamism of the nature they attempt to manage
and a sense of bemusement on nature’s part. It is as though nature, or
God through the natural world, smiles at their efforts.
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
Adam shows a clearer sense of the larger purpose of their labors than
does Eve (God made them for delight, not for ‘‘irksome toil’’ [.], he
reminds her), and of the limits of these labors. In response to her argument that they can get more done if they separate, in the critical scene
that sets the stage for the Fall, he seems less concerned than before about
messy paths. His primary object is to keep Eve by his side, where he
assumes that she belongs:
These paths and Bowers doubt not but our joint hands
Will keep from Wilderness with ease, as wide
As we need walk, till younger hands ere long
Assist us.
(.–)
Wilderness in this negative sense of an engulfing disorder does not
genuinely threaten the Garden as Milton imagined it. There is no suggestion that Adam and Eve are likely to be overwhelmed by the ‘‘wanton growth’’; if they cannot always keep the paths neat, they can at least
keep them open; of that Adam is confident. Humans do belong in this
Garden, in a state of productive tension with its wild fertility, pursuing
their gardening labors in order to preserve the kinds of spaces the ‘‘sovran Planter’’ created for their ‘‘delightful use,’’ as Milton puts it (.–
). These spaces make the Garden habitable and give it a human scale.
I want to question the tendency in critical commentary on the gardening in Eden to view the inherent wildness of nature in the Garden
in purely negative terms, as a threat to an ideal order that Adam and
Eve are trying to achieve by their labors. Evans sees Adam’s supervision
of the Garden as ‘‘absolutely necessary to the preservation of its perfection,’’ a perfection that Evans sees as conditional upon the ability of
Adam and Eve to ‘‘preserve the balance of forces on which it depends.’’ 23
While this view recognizes the dynamism of nature in Eden, it assumes
an ideal that depends upon a degree of control that it seems unlikely
that Adam and Eve can exercise. And this understanding of perfection
makes it dependent upon achieving a condition of stability, however
precarious, that seems incompatible with the ‘‘ceaseless change’’ (.)
that Adam and Eve celebrate in their morning hymn. One could understand the perfection of the Garden differently, as implying completeness and freedom from corruption or flaw, rather than such a condition
of balance.
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23 Evans, Genesis Tradition, –.
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Diane Kelsey McColley describes human effort as essential to ‘‘guard
[the Garden’s] beauty and keep it fruitful.’’ 24 The notion of needing to
work to keep the Garden fruitful, by pruning the fruit trees to make
them more productive, assumes an ideal of domesticated nature that
is at odds with the character of the Garden. By pruning ‘‘overwoody’’
trees and training grape vines on elms, Adam and Eve may increase the
productivity of the Garden in a limited way, but it is hard to see this
as more than a token effort. In a world in which Eve can choose from
among ‘‘fruit of all kinds’’ (.) and is conscious of such abundance
that ‘‘untoucht’’ fruit must await future hands (.–), it makes little
sense to worry about productivity. To make the gardening of Adam and
Eve credible, Milton had to draw upon the experience of gardening in a
world where nature may need managing to be productive by our standards and to yield certain kinds of aesthetic pleasure. A hazard of emphasizing the georgic dimension of Paradise Lost is that we will lose sight
of the unique character of life in Eden, which offers wonder and deeply
satisfying ease as well as the discipline of labor. The labor of Adam and
Eve must be seen in the context of the dynamic interplay of wild nature
and ordered spaces that Milton presents in his Garden and their experience of a nature that is ‘‘Wild above Rule or Art’’ (.). Adam and Eve
take their pruning and propping seriously (they are acting on God’s
mandate and responding to what they perceive as incursions of ‘‘wanton growth’’), but Milton gives the reader a perspective that they lack. If
rule and art were to prevail over nature in the Garden, it would lose its
marvelous qualities and the capacity to offer extraordinary pleasures.
Tidiness and control are not really the point.
The fact that Satan comes upon Eve surrounded by flowers, preoccupied with her task of sustaining them, provides another kind of commentary on the limitations of gardening in Eden. The emotional charge
of this scene comes from the sense of Eve’s loveliness and vulnerability
that it conveys and from the way that it recalls the poignant simile
by which Milton had linked Eve with Proserpina earlier in describing the Garden as surpassing even ‘‘that fair field / Of Enna, where
Proserpin gath’ring flow’rs / Herself a fairer Flow’r by gloomy Dis /
Was gather’d’’ (.–). When Satan sees Eve, newly separated from
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24 McColley, Gust for Paradise, . McColley discusses Eve’s gardening in more detail
in ‘‘Milton’s Environmental Epic: Creature Kinship and the Language of Paradise Lost,’’
in Beyond Nature Writing, ed. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, ), –. She illustrates, approvingly, Eve’s recognition
of the plants’ ‘‘need’’ for tending () and characterizes the dominion that she and Adam
exercise as a form of ‘‘benevolent care’’ ().
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
Adam, she appears half hidden by roses, stooping to support flowers
that hang ‘‘drooping unsustained’’:
them she upstays
Gently with Myrtle band, mindless the while,
Herself, though fairest unsupported Flow’r,
From her best prop so far, and storm so nigh.
(.–)
Like Proserpina, Eve is about to be surprised by the lord of the underworld, but the lines imply blame as well as the pain of imminent loss.
She has cast off her best prop, in Milton’s patriarchal view, and she is
not alert to the danger Adam has warned her about but is lost in her
gardening, ‘‘mindless the while.’’
Milton describes Satan as he approaches as appearing ‘‘now hid, now
seen / Among thick-wov’n Arborets and Flow’rs / Imborder’d on each
Bank, the hand of Eve’’ (. –). ‘‘Hand’’ here means handiwork, the
gardening art by which Eve has apparently shaped this part of the Garden, with its arborets and flower borders. We are told that Satan finds
her in ‘‘the sweet recess of Eve’’ (.), a spot more ‘‘delicious’’ than a
host of legendary gardens. This appears to be a special place within the
larger Garden, to which Eve has withdrawn for some private gardening time. She is not engaged in the work of clearing ‘‘unsightly’’ paths
or reforming alleys overgrown with branches that preoccupies Adam,
rather, she is tying up drooping flowers that, we are told earlier, are responsive to her care: ‘‘they at her coming sprung / And toucht by her
fair tendance gladier grew’’ (.–). Seeing Eve in her ‘‘sweet recess’’
heightens the sense of violation we feel when Satan intrudes, but the
fact that Milton emphasizes the highly gardened nature of the place and
Eve’s own obliviousness to any threat as she tends her flowers suggests
that he wants us to question her absorption in gardening itself and to
see it as a form of self-absorption. Context is critical here. We might be
inclined to admire Eve for her sympathy with the flowers and her ability
to empty her mind of distracting thoughts and immerse herself in the
present moment. In this garden, at this particular moment, however,
Eve’s preoccupation with her flowers is dangerous. It suggests an indulgence and inattention that magnify her vulnerability. Milton’s telling
adjective, ‘‘mindless,’’ makes us see her as unaware, careless, not only
innocent but culpable in a way that Ovid’s Proserpina is not.
After the Fall, Eve’s shocked response when she learns from Michael
that she and Adam will have to leave Eden reveals the depth of her attachment to her flower gardening. One can sympathize with Eve’s re-
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action and still recognize a form of excess and a failure to grasp the
fundamental significance of the loss of Eden, from Milton’s perspective.
Adam comes closer to seeing this significance in his lament for the loss
of the places where he has talked with God in the Garden (.ff.):
‘‘under this Tree,’’ ‘‘among these Pines,’’ ‘‘at this Fountain.’’ Eve’s response focuses on the flowers’ presumed need for her nurturing and on
an environment in which she feels at home, in part because of her efforts
to domesticate it:
O flow’rs,
That never will in other Climate grow,
My early visitation, and my last
At Ev’n, which I bred up with tender hand
From the first op’ning bud, and gave ye Names,
Who now shall rear ye to the Sun, or rank
Your Tribes, and water from th’ambrosial Fount?
Thee lastly nuptial Bower, by mee adorn’d
With what to sight or smell was sweet; from thee
How shall I part, and whither wander down
Into a lower World, to this obscure
And wild, how shall we breathe in other Air
Less pure, accustomed to immortal Fruits?
(.–)
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It is hard not to be moved by this lament, really a lament for the loss
of a state of being and for an identity, which in this passage has strong
maternal overtones, as well as a lament for the particular pleasures of
tending these flowers. Eve’s anxious evocation of a lower world, ‘‘to this
obscure / And wild,’’ suggests that the loss she imagines includes the
pleasurable sense of control she enjoyed through her work of tending
and adorning. An ‘‘obscure’’ world is one that is dark or gloomy as well
as unknown, and ‘‘wild’’ in this context implies an uncertainty and disorder radically unlike anything she has known in her previous experience of nature.
Eve’s fear that her flowers will not grow in ‘‘other Climate’’ is a reasonable one, but I believe that Milton wants us to see her as naive here
in supposing that the flowers of the Garden need her to ‘‘rear’’ them in
ranks and water them, and in believing that she herself can exist only
in Eden. Michael will teach Adam a lesson that she must learn also, that
God ‘‘attributes to place / No sanctity’’ (.–), and he will do this
in part by the painful device of describing how paradise will be swept
away by the flood,
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
With all his verdure spoil’d, and Trees adrift
Down the great River to the op’ning Gulf,
And there take root an Island salt and bare,
The haunt of Seals and Orcs, and Sea-mews’ clang.
(.–)
This vision of the destruction of an ideal, anticipated by the earlier scene
in which Milton describes newly fierce winds rending the trees of the
Garden, does more than teach a lesson, of course. It evokes an enormous sense of loss. This loss has many dimensions, but one important
one is the loss of a relationship with the natural world that had a degree of intimacy and ease, and a capacity for unselfconscious delight in
sensuous pleasure, that Milton saw as irretrievably lost with the Fall.
The postlapsarian nature that we see in the image of Adam tilling the
ground is one in which all the marvelous vitality and fertility that we
find in Eden has gone out of the earth, and with it the possibility of a
truly harmonious relationship with the natural world.
The fear of wildness embodied in Eve’s lament and in Adam’s earlier
cry (‘‘How can I live without thee . . . in these wild Woods forlorn?’’) reflects the sense of discontinuity between life in Eden and life in a fallen
world that runs through Paradise Lost and gives the poem much of its
complexity and power. Milton’s play on the meanings of wildness becomes one means of registering this discontinuity. If Adam and Eve
never consciously express the appreciation for a nature wild above rule
or art that the narrator does, they delight in their interaction with a nature that ‘‘mocks’’ their efforts to subdue it. These efforts are essential
to Milton’s conception of life in the Garden, as an expression of the importance and dignity of the human presence in the natural world and
as one way of giving meaning to lives that might otherwise seem slack.
They can be seen as a means of enacting obedience to God, by following the mandate to tend the Garden, and perhaps also as a means of
signalling the importance of learning moral discipline. Yet it is easy to
overemphasize the humanistic, educative value of work in Eden at the
expense of the joys of living with a natural world as fresh, exuberant,
and marvelous as the one Milton represented in the Garden.
I conclude with two dawn scenes that suggest the nature of this joy
and link it with qualities of the natural world that I have been discussing. Adam describes to Raphael how he awakened for the first time and
perceived an active, delightful natural world around him: ‘‘all things
smil’d / With fragrance and with joy my heart o’erflowed’’ (.–).
He has not yet been led up by God into the Garden itself, but the fra-
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grance anticipates the ‘‘Wilderness of sweets’’ that the Garden offers
and serves Milton as a way of expressing the sensuous character of
Adam’s joy. Fragrance becomes the signature of paradise for Milton,
representing the mood it evokes in everyone but Satan, incapable of
joy because of his hostility to the Creator of the natural world that embodies it.
The other scene occurs in the passage at the beginning of book  in
which Adam calls to a sleeping Eve in words that echo the Song of
Songs:
Awake, the morning shines, and the fresh field
Calls us; we lose the prime, to mark how spring
Our tended Plants, how blows the Citron Grove,
What drops the Myrrh, and what the balmy Reed.
(.–)
This could be a morning in the world we know, except for the lemon
trees, myrrh, and ‘‘balmy Reed.’’ Prime, the first hour in the Roman
day, here suggests nature ‘‘[wantoning] as in her prime’’ and the vitality
of the newly created world. Adam anticipates joys that await in the
‘‘fresh field,’’ but this is one of those moments in Paradise Lost colored
by Milton’s elegiac sense. Eve has overslept because of the dream
prompted by Satan that prefigures the Fall. The moment illustrates one
of the characteristics of Milton’s representation of wild nature in Paradise Lost, which has the effect of making the ‘‘enormous bliss’’ it pours
forth inseparable from a sense of its transience. I dwell on this sense of
loss because it is so woven into the fabric of Milton’s poem and also because, as I have said, it links him with the sense of a vanishing wildness
one finds in nineteenth-century America, and after. There was nothing
in Milton’s experience analogous to Audubon’s Louisiana or Thoreau’s
Maine woods, of course. What he rendered was a mythic place, and his
imagining of this was colored by a long literary tradition, but that tradition does not explain why he attached so much value to the capacity for
wildness of nature in this place, with its ‘‘wanton growth.’’ We cannot
answer this question fully, but I think that the answer has to do with a
kind of yearning that resurfaced in nineteenth-century America in another form and that is still with us, a yearning for a pristine, vital natural
world where we can make a place for ourselves and find harmony and
delight. This may be a lost ideal, or simply one that we need to keep
reinventing, but it is a powerful and enduring one.
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University of Michigan