Anti-paean to gardening

Gustav Klimt. Apple Tree, I, 1912

Emerson became more wealthy around 1847 and was able to buy land to plant a large orchard of fruit trees.   Mostly this was a great change, but he also felt like it cramped him.  Richardson says, "Emerson was coming quickly to regret having bought additional land and having set out ambitious plantings."

In his journal he wrote (in his vigorous prose) this anti-paean to gardening:

No land is bad, but land is worse.  I delight in long free walks. These free my brain and serve my body.... But these stoopings and scrapings and figurings in a few square yards of garden are dispiriting, driveling, and I seem to have eaten lotus, to be robbed of all energy, and I have a sort of catalepsy, or unwillingness to move, and have grown peevish and poor-spirited.