wild roses. (He wrote somewhere that in working with flowers, trees, and vegetables he was often aware of what their heavenly origin was; for to him a rose was not just a rose, it was the earthly expression of some celestial emotion.)
As he had inherited the garden from another owner, he of course did not always know what was going to come up in it, and he noted that "by the currant bush there were old roses, marsh mallows and gilliflowers of a curious kind," and elsewhere there were other flowers and vegetables, not on his program, such as African roses and velvet roses and beside them lilies, rose-mallows and sunflowers.3
It may have been during the discovery of and communion with these frail messengers from other people and times that he became aware, so he said, of spirits in the garden who greatly resisted the idea of a new owner who introduced changes; but he pacified them,4 and introduced "singular Dutch figures of animals cut in box-tree" and little garden pavilions like some he had seen in his travels. In the middle there was one copied from an English model; another had curious mirror effects, another was a volière for birds with wide netting, and at the end of the garden he finally built himself a summerhouse, containing his library, where he liked to work, being apparently like every other man who gets a house of his own, anxious to have a little house still more his own.
Near this there was a "labyrinth," or, as his friend Robsahm5 wrote, "a maze of boards, entirely for the amusement of the good people that would come and visit him in his garden, and especially for their children; and there he would receive them with a cheerful countenance and enjoy their delight at his contrivances."
The little house with the mirrors, Robsahm said, was arranged so that when the visitor opened a door, he faced another door with a window that seemed to look into another garden, but it was a mirror which reflected "a green hedge where a beautiful bird-cage was placed . . . the effect was most charming and surprising. Swedenborg derived much sport from this arrangement, especially when inquisitive and curious young ladies came into his garden."
Swedenborg was no recluse—but neither was he merely an amiable and sociable man of independent means, secretly devoted to "occult" studies, and publicly devoted to pottering in his garden.
