Hortus Vitae Essays on the Gardening of Life — A Closer Reading

The Garden as a Figure for Choice

The title Hortus Vitae (Garden of Life) signals Lee's central conceit: living as a form of cultivation. But she does not develop this into a rigid allegory. Instead, the garden appears in fragments—a sprig of box offered to a statue, the 'paths and thickets of speculation.' The metaphor allows her to move between concrete observation and abstract reflection without losing grip on the physical world. When she writes of 'the essential goodness and fruitfulness of life,' the phrase earns its weight from the dying friend who taught her that 'we must be prepared to begin life many times afresh.' The garden is not a static symbol but a process of continual replanting.

The Paradox of Talk and Silence

One of the most striking essays, 'In Praise of Silence,' argues that true companionship does not require words. Lee distinguishes between 'intelligent conversation' that distracts from the moment and the silent presence of someone who 'cares for the same kind of things.' She recalls Hazlitt's advice to walk alone, but proposes something more perfect: a companion whose remarks 'feel restful, spacious, cool, airy—like silence.' The essay's structure mimics its subject, circling back on itself with the admission that such persons 'talk little, or (what is even better) seem to talk little.' Lee's prose here is precise and self-aware, catching the paradox of praising silence in words.

Conversation as Performance and Trap

Elsewhere, Lee dramatizes the social pressure to talk. She imagines a scene where friends begin to 'contradict what they agree with, and ask definitions of what they perfectly understand.' The speaker rushes in, 'excited—who can tell?—perhaps delighted,' only to feel 'miserably humiliated and depressed' the next morning. This is not a general complaint about society but a specific psychological portrait: the person who cannot resist argument, who turns meaning into nonsense. The detail of 'additional definitions over the banisters' grounds the abstraction in a domestic moment. Lee's ear for dialogue—the way people talk about talking—gives the essay its texture.

Friendship and the Work of Revision

The dedication reveals that Delzant 'had made me rewrite several among these essays' during her illness. This fact is not merely biographical; it illuminates Lee's method. The essays are not spontaneous outpourings but crafted objects, shaped by a friend's ear for English as a foreign language. The 'little hesitation' of Delzant's reading 'spaced and accentuated their meaning.' Lee's prose, with its long, sinuous sentences and careful qualifications, bears the mark of that collaboration. The book becomes an artifact of friendship, its arguments about companionship enacted in its own making.

Readers should approach Hortus Vitae not as a manual for living but as a series of experiments in attention. Lee's essays reward slow reading: her sentences often double back, qualifying themselves, and her arguments emerge through accumulation rather than assertion. The garden metaphor is less a system than a permission to move between the particular and the general. Pay attention to the small details—the sprig of box, the banister definitions—for they carry the weight of the book's claims about what makes life worth living.

That rainy afternoon, Hortus Vitae lingered with me—Lee’s essay on silence felt like a held breath. Her garden of companionship, cultivated so carefully, made me think of what grows unseen, beneath the surface. Later, thumbing my notes, I drifted to her other collection, The Colour of Life — Key Ideas to Explore, and found the same quiet light, filtering through different leaves. It felt like returning to a familiar bench, one I hadn’t remembered finding.