In Praise of the Earth
A Journey into the Garden
1st Edition
Published on 12. September 2025
Book
Hardback
160 pages
978-1-5095-6789-8 (ISBN)
Description
The earth is not a dead, mute landscape but an eloquent, living being. Sometimes it just takes a spade, a packet of seeds, and a pair of sturdy boots to realize it. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han spent three springs, summers, autumns, and winters in his secret garden in Berlin, devoting himself to daily gardening in all weathers. For Han, gardening is a form of silent meditation, a lingering in stillness. It gives you a different sense of time. Every plant has its own time that is specific to it, and the garden is a space in which these multiple temporalities overlap and cut across one another. The longer he worked in the garden, the more respect he developed for the earth and for its enchanting beauty.
Gardening taught him what care for others means. Each organism has its own consciousness of time passing; each organism lives in its own micro-universe. Step by step, Han receded from himself and the world, moving closer and closer to an exuberant, divine nature which we are increasingly in danger of losing.
Through this rich meditation on plants, soil, gardening, and time, Han unfolds a way of relating to and tending the earth that is in sharp contrast to the brutal, incessant exploitation of our planet that we see all around us today.
Gardening taught him what care for others means. Each organism has its own consciousness of time passing; each organism lives in its own micro-universe. Step by step, Han receded from himself and the world, moving closer and closer to an exuberant, divine nature which we are increasingly in danger of losing.
Through this rich meditation on plants, soil, gardening, and time, Han unfolds a way of relating to and tending the earth that is in sharp contrast to the brutal, incessant exploitation of our planet that we see all around us today.
Reviews / Votes
Finalist for the 2025 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction"This is a book of exquisite beauty filled with the scents and colours of flowers and quiet changing of seasons in the author's Berlin garden. But more than that, it is a book of profound wisdom, a calm and deeply welcome antidote to the harshness of our troubled world."
Esther Woolfson, author of Corvus
"Steeped in German philosophy and high culture, Han's reflections... will yield for patient readers subtle and lovely insights... This poetic volume will nourish gardeners and nature lovers."
Publishers Weekly
"Han turns so completely toward wholeness that his writing seems an alien arrival: the work of a being that loves wholly, uselessly, openly... It would be good and wise to enter that other time with Han's voice and try to live there for a little while."
Front Porch Republic
"Han's book, written in his characteristically crystalline prose, and sparklingly translated from the German by Daniel Steuer, calls august witnesses (Martin Heidegger, Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertolt Brecht and many others), to testify to the truths of what he discovered in the garden."
Charles Foster, Times Literary Supplement
"In Praise of the Earth is a philosophical song, which finds in the most delicate blossom a resounding call for care. 'Flowering is rapture,' Han writes and reading this book too, is a rapturous experience."
The Conversation
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 145 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
324 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5095-6789-8 (9781509567898)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
09/2025
1st Edition
Wiley-Scrivener
€14.99
Available for download
Persons
Byung-Chul Han is the author of more than twenty books including The Burnout Society, Saving Beauty and The Spirit of Hope.
Content
Preface
Winterreise
Winter Garden
Time of the Other
Back to the Earth
Romanticizing the World
Winter-flowering Cherry
Winter Aconites and Witch Hazel
White Forsythia
Anemones
Camellias
Willow Catkins
Autumn Crocuses
Plantain Lilies (Hosta)
On Happiness
Beautiful Names
Victoria Amazonica
Colchicum Autumnale
Diary of a Gardener
List of Illustrations
Notes
Winterreise
Winter Garden
Time of the Other
Back to the Earth
Romanticizing the World
Winter-flowering Cherry
Winter Aconites and Witch Hazel
White Forsythia
Anemones
Camellias
Willow Catkins
Autumn Crocuses
Plantain Lilies (Hosta)
On Happiness
Beautiful Names
Victoria Amazonica
Colchicum Autumnale
Diary of a Gardener
List of Illustrations
Notes