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

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.

Like Nietzsche's own writings on education, most of mine were relatively youthful ones. Both were inspired by a critical animus against prevailing trends in education: in Nietzsche's case, the production either of 'useless', dry-as-dust scholars or people 'useful' for the needs of an expanding industrial economy; in my case, a similar subjection of education to economic imperatives, but also to ideological obsessions, notably with promoting 'equality'.

Gardening is an excellent example of a practice to which, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, certain virtues are 'internal'. Good gardening requires a certain goodness on the part of the gardener: care, humility, patience, and respect, for example.

It's one thing to assent to propositions like 'The way of things is ineffable', and quite another to internalise what it is being gestured at by such propositions, to get a sense or feel for mystery. For me, at least, it is in and through ways of engaging with nature that this sense is intimated. These ways include being in the garden.

In all great civilizations, garden discourses have belonged to larger discourses about beauty, the good life, the relation of humankind to nature, and so on.

It's as if, for Schopenhauer and perhaps Kant, the mind is there up and running, equipped with its categories and concepts that it then projects or smears, as it were, over what impinges upon it from the outside. This is not the image you find in, for example, Chuang Tzu: minds and nature are inseparably fused in an ever-changing whole of experience that, so to speak, constantly wells up from an indescribable source in a process that Daoists call 'the way' or 'the course'.