ABSTRACT
So J. M. Synge opens his description of 'A Landlord's Garden in County Wicklow'. His image combines luxuriant life and imminent demise: 'half choked with leaves'. Here nature 'left to itself' produces abundantly, but it does so because this is a garden, still walled off from the less fruitful land around. The terms 'household' and 'season', the reference to rare plants discoverable only by those who 'had the knowledge', invoke the kind of life that would once have fostered and fed upon that abundance. The title of the article and these first few lines are enough to nudge us into reading the description as an emblem: this 'landlord's garden' reflects, as Synge goes
I Synge, 1910:1980, 55. The essay, from which all my quotations in the three following paragraphs are taken, is on pages 55-57.
