CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Gardener, Statesman, Author
IN following Swedenborg into the next world, it is easy to forget that he had by no means retired from this one. From 1747 to about 1751 he was abroad in various countries, busy putting down his new interpretation of the Bible or trying to fathom the psychology of spirits, but he also took pains to see his friends and he was concerned about his garden in Stockholm. He ordered seeds and bulbs for it, in 1750, from his good friend, the Swedish merchant Wretman in Amsterdam, and received useful advice from the latter about putting the tulip, hyacinth, and other bulbs into the ground in the autumn before the frost began.1
He was back in Sweden in 1751 and deep in gardening, on the rocky islet of Södermalm where his house stood. He owned a piece of land 336 by 156 feet, enclosed by a wooden fence. About two thirds of it were used for orchard and garden, the rest for his house and outhouses. The house was about 57 by 48 feet, and the upper story had an "orangery," or greenhouse, lit by six windows in the roof.2
There Swedenborg had his seedlings in spring. In his almanac for 1752 he notes not only what copy for the Arcana Celestia he had sent to John Lewis the printer in London, but also what he had planted and when. In February he had "in the first box crown artichokes; second box, lemons, in the centre mallium, after that cypresses; third box gilliflowers of three kinds, with white ones in the middle."
The garden was divided by linden avenues into four parts, and in the 1752 almanac he also noted where he had planted lemon seeds, cypress seeds, and carnations, next to them sweet peas, and next to them parsley-roots and beets. But he had a proper flower section with "Adonis roses, scarlet beans, larkspur, violet-roses and plants with white and yellow bordered leaves," and elsewhere violets, bleeding hearts, sweet william, a bed of spinach and another of parsley, and then large sweet white roses, flax, scabiosa and
