The Myth of an Apolitical Eden

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This text is an adapted excerpt from “Babylon, Albion”, by Dalia Al-Dujaili, 2025. saqibooks.com

Whether earthly or heavenly, our understanding of paradise—an eternal state of peace and rest— remains a garden. This idea found its way into Abrahamic texts: Eden shares its narrative with the Sumerian “garden of the gods,” which was later adopted by the Babylonians who conquered Sumer (ancient Iraq). So that today, Judeo-Christian and Islamic origin stories share strikingly similar, and in some cases, even directly mirror ancient Sumerian myths.

A garden is seen as a divine space, a place almost between heaven and earth. Perhaps it is because we can create our own paradise in a garden. We can create our own sense of belonging by interacting with the natural world in a way which seems understandable to us. We water the same plant over years or see the same tree changing its facade over multiple seasons.

In a garden, we find nature “at peace.” We don’t find floods and forest fires, we don’t find great storms and the rotting corpses of animals, we don’t find diseases that wipe out whole populations of insects. We curate and manufacture nature to fit our image of a natural world which is inherently beautiful, virtuous, and harmless.

But a garden is not the neutral place we think it is. Our gardens are both reflections of our identities and spaces where politics are practiced.

In 1936, three years after Adolf Hitler came to power, a German landscape architect argued for the need “to design blood-and-soil-rooted gardens.” The idea spread throughout Germany, influenced by the landscape architect and Nazi, Willy Lange. “Our feelings for our homeland should be rooted in the character of domestic landscapes,” he argued. He was key in issuing a law forbidding the use of any plants deemed non-native.

These ideas didn’t take root in the UK. The pioneering Irish gardener, William Robinson, known for popularizing the design of English “cottage gardens,” argued for the integration of foreign plants into British gardens and advocated for the naturalization of “hardy exotic plants” in his pioneering work, The Wild Garden. He promoted the idea of incorporating non-native species that could thrive in the British climate, as well as “mixed borders” made up of a mix of herbaceous plants, thereby enriching the diversity and beauty of local gardens as spaces which celebrated the fluidity of nature.

The gardens of stately homes are aesthetic feats of engineering—where landscape design meets ecology and artistic finesse. But the garden has so often been the site of practicing and performing a certain idea, or ideal, of Britishness. It is often a site that contains Englishness, where cosmopolitanism and a mixing of non-native plants is carried out under the supervision of the gardener.

The term “English rose” is usually associated with English girls of fair skin and delicate features, likening the lady to the national flower of England. The term was adopted from the Tudor rose which became the symbol of the nation state of England.

However, most of our beloved English garden roses as we know them today are not native to the UK. The cultivation of garden roses began with the Romans, who brought them from areas in Southwest Asia where roses had long been cultivated, first from the ancient Egyptians, who the Romans later traded with and took heavy influence from, while also sourcing roses from Iran, Turkey and Syria. The rose is the national flower of Iraq, where it is a true native. The English rose, then, is really a symbol of cosmopolitanism, not the province of a nation state and its identity. British gardens are, really, very multicultural.

“Something so synonymous with English identity is in fact international,” writes one British blogger of the flower, which reminds me that British identity is as much about foreignness as it is about nativeness.

Gardens, with their walls, boundaries and guidelines, ask us to consider why we value dominance, control, and maintenance of nature, and how we categorize belonging in a patch of soil.