The Garden's Message

The Garden's Message

When a person perceives a garden, one does not see beyond the beauty and observe any further than its physical detail--a deeper meaning that must be discovered is what the garden truly resembles. A garden is not just a garden. For Sophie, a garden is a reminder and a metaphor of life and nurture, memory, and connection that explain her relationship to Anton and Emiko, and to understand ones own life.

A garden itself is a symbol of life. Everything in a garden is living, its flowers, detail, and animals if all maintained grow and continue to remain. When Anton first learns that Sophie's Lupus has left her with the unfortunate circumstance that she cannot have children, she maintains a garden as an alternative to nurture. By having this garden, she fills the void by nurture, as well as her marriage. The animals she carves from wood are exceptionally a mystery for Anton who could never understand why she did not carve shapes rather than animals, but he never asks. The cycle of Anton's journeys that always forced him to leave her and return also gave Sophie a more important desire for her gardening maintenance. Soon after Sophie's death, Anton lives through Sophie by maintaining what she left, what Anton must discover is that the answers to all his questions can be answered through the garden that she left:

"Maybe her patience had outlived her, because she'd waited too long for him to discover what she had left out there for him. Not once had he seen anything that served to illuminate her heart, according to what he'd told me those dark late nights after her death." (Ash Garden 278).

This quote shows that Anton has yet to discover the meaning of the message that Sophie had left for him to discover- to make these very connections that they had lost.

Sophie's memories when she was alive had been molded into the garden, that is left with the memories which must be sorted out now by Anton. The garden that Sophie created holds personal meaning of her life endeavours, in hopes that Anton may one day figure out.

"I'd watched him secretly my first night here, and since then felt disinclined to intrude again. I had left him alone to play the guessing game of unresolved meanings, of memories of Japan and of picnics in the desert, and to look of explanations he should've known would never come, for absolution that would never be extended." (Ash Garden 280).

When Emiko observes the garden further, she somehow is reminded of her life as well. Emiko relates the garden to her experience of the war, when the garden comes to her mind she states:

"Under a perfect blue sky--and again a different morning sky came to me, and the white plume of smoke trailing it. Briefly I pictured myself stepping up from the sand and mud of the Ota River like one of Sophie's fish rising up from evolutionary waters. Those twelve