For many years, questions about the meaning of life were dismissed as senseless. We were told that life, not being a word or sentence or anything language-like, can't intelligibly be said to have meaning. An encouraging development in the last couple of decades is a return by philosophers to addressing - as nearly all people do at some time or another - the question of life's meaning.

It would be through individual effort, inspired perhaps by reading Nietzsche's books, that the Overman might emerge, not through social or educational engineering.

It is hubris, claim the critics of 'absolutism', to suppose that we could ever even approximate to a true description of how the world anyway is. It is bad faith or 'bullshit', respond 'absolutists', to suppose - as the rhetoric of postmodernism implies - that we could seriously live and act with the thought that truth and value are simply our own projections. An attractive feature of 'ineffabilism', as I see it, is that it evades these accusations.

I don't think we should just 'muddle through' and ignore the question of life's meaning. Or better, perhaps, I don't think it is a question that can be ignored once the business of asking about the worth and significance of what one is doing - one's work, one's pleasures, one's ambitions and so on - has got going. You can't at any point stop the urge to ask Tolstoy's questions, '... and then what?', 'What's the point of that?'.

There is something myopic and stunted in focussing only on the meaning of words and sentences. And this myopia is especially unfortunate when combined with a rather abstract view of a language as a set of elements and rules for combining these. For the result is to divorce enquiry into meaning from attention to the way words - and gestures, facial expressions, rituals and so on - are embedded in practices, in what Wittgenstein called 'the stream of life'.

The focus of environmental ethics should indeed be on the virtues and how these inform our relationship to natural environments.

As for the meaning of gardens, particular gardens may have, of course, all sorts of different meanings - emotive, historical, emblematic, religious, commemorative, and so on. But I think that good gardens all signify or exemplify an important truth about the relationship of culture and nature - their inseparability.