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.

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 no reason at all to think that creatures with very different purposes and concerns would arrive at the scientific image, and no reason at all to accuse such creatures of getting the world wrong - a point that both Chuang Tzu and Nietzsche make when comparing human and animal perspectives.

Certainly each side - the 'absolutists' and the 'constructivists' or 'humanists', as I've labelled them - accuses the other of hubris, and lays claim to humility. I see hubris on both sides: a pretence that we could ascend to an objective account of the world, on the one hand, and a pretence that we have the resources to live and act without a sense of there being something to which we answerable, on the other. So both sides are 'villains'.

The garden is as good a symbol as you can find of a dialectic between spheres of experience - of culture and nature - that presuppose one another.

What impressed me about Plato and Sartre was their conviction that we should live our lives in the light of big truths about reality and human existence.

Between nature and music there seems to be an elective affinity: they fit together, and when they do experiences of an ineffable kind are generated.