How people make gardens is bound to reflect a way of experiencing the natural world, while at the same time this experience of nature is bound to reflect a culture - ways of painting nature, for example, or representing nature in literature, or of course making gardens.

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.

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.

Does the unmistakeable intent of Versailles to proclaim dominion over nature destroy its aesthetic appeal, as Schopenhauer thought? Does the greenness of the lawn lose its allure when we learn how much water, sorely needed elsewhere, it uses? And historical shifts in garden taste - from formal, 'French' gardens to 'Capability' Brown's landscapes, for instance, or from the elaborate gardens of imperial Kyoto to Zen 'dry' gardens - register important changes in philosophical or religious attitudes.

There are really three players: 'absolutists', for whom it is possible to describe reality as it anyway is; 'constructivists' or 'humanists', for whom there is nothing beyond a world that is relative to human interests and conceptual schemes; and 'ineffabilists', like myself, for whom any describable world indeed exists 'only in relation to man', as Heidegger put it, but for whom, as well, there is an ineffable realm 'beyond the human'.

In the final analysis, all explanations of meaning, various as they are, serve to indicate how something is 'appropriate' in and to our practices, our lives in effect.

It turns out, in fact, that 'theories of meaning' are typically not about meaning in an everyday or 'folk' sense at all. They are theories designed to compute the truth or assertibility conditions of sentences from their components.