Green Garden Research Articles

Driving Sustainable Waste Management in Northern Ireland-Home Composting of "Green Garden Waste" in Castlereagh

Castlereagh Borough Council (Castlereagh BC) borders with Belfast in the east of Northern Ireland and serves a population of approximately 67,500. There are approximately 28,500 properties in the borough and 80% of households lie within urban areas. In 2007/8, Castlereagh BC had a household waste recycling and composting rate of 37.69%. In 2007/8, 19,603 tonnes of household waste was landfilled this equates to 0.69 tonnes per household. The Council actively promotes Home Composting of green garden waste as a method of waste reduction and has offered a subsidised rate on the sale of Home Composters. In order to evaluate whether this subsidisation is justified, a survey was carried out on all householders that have purchased a Home Composters. It was hoped that this survey would provide information on whether householders who had purchased Home Composters from the Council were actually using them, whilst also gauging whether householders are aware of the relationship between composting and diversion from landfill. Some 96% of respondents that purchased Home Composters are still using them. This is extremely encouraging and demonstrates that they would appear to be satisfied with their Home Composting experiences. Respondents (92%) stated that they noticed a decrease in the amount of their waste being sent for landfill/composting through the kerbside collections, this demonstrates that they are aware of the relationship between Home Composting and diversion from landfill. Some 86% of householders feel that they are using their Home Composter successfully and 93% of householders were satisfied with the scheme. However, 17% of householders complained about composter design and 16% found it difficult to use. Size, mobility and the unattached lid were of main concern. The results will be used to drive enhanced campaigns for the uptake of home composting of green garden waste

Effects of fungivorous nematodes on corky root disease of tomato grown in compost-amended soil

The effect of fungivorous nematodes, Aphelenchus avenae and Aphelenchoides spp., against corky root disease of tomato caused by Pyrenochaeta lycopersici was investigated. Three different greenhouse trials were conducted using soil naturally infested with P. lycopersici, alone or mixed with four different types of compost consisting of green manure, garden waste and horse manure (20% compost by volume). The fungivorous nematodes were propagated in cultures of the fungus Pochonia bulbillosa and inoculated (3 or 23 nematodes ml−1 substrate) into the soil and soil-compost mixtures one day after transplanting of tomato seedlings. Greenhouse experiments were terminated after ten weeks and disease was measured from infected roots after harvesting. Aphelenchus avenae significantly reduced the disease severity when added to infested soil without compost in all experiments. Aphelenchoides spp. did not suppress the disease either in the presence or absence of compost. Among the composts tested, only a garden waste compost was found to be suppressive to the disease. Neither A. avenae nor Aphelenchoides spp. improved the suppressive effect of the compost.

In Aunt Giraffe's Green Garden (review)

Reviewed by: In Aunt Giraffe's Green Garden Deborah Stevenson Prelutsky, Jack In Aunt Giraffe's Green Garden; illus. by Petra Mathers. Greenwillow, 200764p Library ed. ISBN 978-0-06-623869-2$17.89 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-623868-5$16.99 R 4-7 yrs Twenty-eight poems from the children's poet laureate offer whimsical snapshots of people, animals, and brief occurrences. This is Prelutsky for younger audiences, with the compact verses musing rather than snappy and the subjects simple: a goose and a duck drive around the country; a Kansas City girl frolics in a fountain; a couple dances in Spokane. The verses are a little uneven, but most of the poetry has a pretty particularity (the verses are rife with place names from Maine to La Jolla) and a gentle circular or episodic tendency that recall nursery rhymes. Full-page paintings and vignettes in Mathers' saturated watercolors illustrate the verses; the art sports her usual combination of rich tones and otherworldly flatness, which here eminently suits the modest strangeness of the poetry by suggesting a benevolent world of kindergarten-level magic realism. Use this for a step up from Opie's Here Comes Mother Goose (BCCB 12/99) or as a source for quick poetical counterpoints in a storytime. Copyright © 2007 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Year One, and: The Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Year One, and: The Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time Marsha Rabe (bio) Year One Griefe brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,For he tames it, that fetters it in verse. —John Donne This is my mother's first yeardead. The poppies she cheer-led into bloomlast June now rupture the groundwithout her, their shrill colors as conceitedas popes on the Vatican balcony, bobbingand waving, a line of splendidLeos, Pius one through twelve,fat Johns, gaunt Johns, seeminglyinterchangeable, seemingly eternal.This is her first Christmas Eve—no Santa.This is her first Easter—no eggs, no resurrection—Her first Mother's Day—no guilt. Ha!Her first birthday. But who's counting?She is rhododendron now as much as wind chime,squirrel as much as green garden hose,grass grub, trowel. I love my new calendar, [End Page 178] how its days repeat and rhyme, amassing her absence.Today I will put my shovel into the earth, feel the dirtyield like flesh, hear the clang of metal on rockas if the rock were bone. I will extract the rockand in the void the rock leaves I will plantthis thing called goat's beard, fanning outits gauzy roots, composting, watering, tending it.She will be goat's beard for now, and laterblack-eyed Susan on the hill.True gardeners work by the phases of the moon.Foxes return on time. I possess her now as never.I summon her. She rises on command.The dead can learn to obey. The Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time The priest at St. Mary's is miked,so the Body of Christ sounds crisp as a snack.I'm sorry for him, his Holy Communionbroadcast like a song. At the Sign of Peace, my mother says sheloves me—now, at last. She says so urgently,as if she's just remembered an unpaid bill. I wish I were small enough to fit inside her—in her hand—or better yet, to ridelike Christ's white corpse in the shallowspoon of her tongue. [End Page 179] Marsha Rabe Marsha Rabe is the director of publications at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, Connecticut. She has published a short story in the Atlantic Monthly and a personal essay on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Copyright © 2007 University of Nebraska Press

The South Shropshire biowaste digester, UK

The South Shropshire biowaste digester is designed to recycle 5000 t per year of source-segregated household kitchen waste and green garden waste. This waste, collected at the kerbside, is transformed into renewable electricity and biofertiliser. It is one of nine full-scale projects funded by the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to demonstrate technologies that enable biodegradable municipal waste to be diverted from landfill. Previous research, over a period of eight years leading to the biowaste digester, concentrated on the anaerobic digestion of food waste, which is able to contribute to the positive reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases in a number of different ways. As a renewable energy technology, anaerobic digestion is unusual in that the overall net reduction in the emission of carbon dioxide is greater than simply the carbon dioxide emissions from the fossil fuels that it displaces; however, apart from its application on sewage works and in landfill sites, the process is not yet widely applied in the UK. The project met the necessary permitting requirements and construction started in June 2005. The first biowaste was processed in March 2006 and the plant is operating at 50% of its design throughput. The first year of operation has shown that the quality of the biowaste is very different from that anticipated, in particular with a low capture of food waste. This issue is being addressed in order that the project can demonstrate the effective role that anaerobic digestion can play in the UK's future waste management strategy.

Potential for Local “Bring Sites” to Reduce Householder Recycling Mileage

Using a significant database of origin postcodes, a study was designed to estimate the current annual mileage associated with visitor trips to household waste recycling centers (HWRCs)—known as manned recycling drop-off centers in the United States—and to identify how this mileage could be reduced if a series of “bring sites” (unmanned recycling drop-off centers) in the community were enhanced to take green garden waste. The total annual distance driven by approximately 4,677,000 visitors to the 26 HWRCs in Hampshire, United Kingdom, is estimated to be 40 million kilometers (assuming that 60% of visitors made dedicated trips), costing approximately £14 million (£1 = $1.896 in April 2005 U.S. dollars) in private transport and emitting approximately 1,873 tonnes of CO2 (as carbon) into the atmosphere. Providing a network of 104 bring sites capable of accepting green waste, in addition to the existing facilities provided by the 26 HWRCs, could save approximately 8.5 million kilometers (21%) of vehicle travel per annum (£3 million in visitor transport costs and approximately 369 tonnes of CO2 as carbon). Such a scheme would require a fleet of approximately 78 refuse collection vehicles at an annual cost to the scheme provider of slightly more than £1.5 million. If HWRCs become a major channel for the return and reprocessing of waste electrical and electronic equipment and some newly classified hazardous waste items, space at existing sites could become an issue. More local consolidation of certain waste categories (e.g., green waste) would enable HWRCs to focus their activities better.

The environmental importance of front gardens

The environmental importance of front gardens is examined in the context of climate change. Domestic front gardens help to absorb carbon dioxide, soak up rainfall and thus reduce flooding risks, provide open spaces for pleasant townscapes, protect biodiversity reserves and help conserve energy through shade and shelter. The continuing loss of front gardens is a result of increasing car ownership, off-street parking pressures, changes in garden fashion, wider lifestyle changes and perhaps also the absence in some cultures of any garden tradition. At a time of climatic uncertainty there are many positive ways in which a multi-purpose approach to front gardens can allow parking while retaining a green garden. The planning system is needed to ensure national awareness of the environmental importance of front gardens. The significance of their increasing loss and a multiple-use approach to alleviate the problems caused by current trends are discussed.

The Making of the Modern German Landscape

Historically Speaking November/December 2006 David Blackbourn on The Conquest of Nature A SOCIETY'S ATTITUDE TOWARD NATURE CAN REVEAL MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN. A WONderful example ofthis is DavidBlackbourn 's latest book, The Conquest ofNature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (Norton, 2006). Blackbourn, who is the Coolidge Professor ofHistory at Harvard, has written several important books, including The Peculiarities ofGerman History (with G. Eley, 1984); Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany (1994); and The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780-1918 (1997). We invited him to write an essay exploring some ofthe themes ofhis new book, which Historically Speaking editor Donald Yerxa pursues a bitfurther in an interview conducted on October 4, 2006 in Blackbourn s office at Harvard's Minda de Gunzburg Centerfor European Studies. The Making of the Modern German Landscape David Blackbourn When German soldiers went off to war in 1914, patriotic writers told them they were defending the "great green garden " of their country. This was the cradle of national character; whatever cataclysmic changes the war might bring the landscape was reassuringly there, unchanging. Except, of course, that it wasn't. A German of 1914, transported back to 1750, would have been astounded at how different the "natural" landscape looked. Much less of it was cultivated, much more of it dominated by sand or scrub and especially by water. The 20th-century visitor would not need to journey far before stumbling upon ponds and lakes long drained and forgotten, or marshes that contemporaries likened to the wetlands of the New World, even to Amazonia. Filled with snaking channels half-hidden by overhanging lianas, these dwelling places of mosquitoes, frogs, fish, wild boar, and wolves not only looked but smelled and sounded quite different from the open landscape of canals and manicured fields familiar to 20th-century Germans. The great river valleys had been transformed as well. Unlike the modern artery, engineered to flow swiftly in a single channel between embankments , the 18th-century river meandered over its floodplain or made its way through hundreds of separate channels divided by sandbars, gravel banks, and islands. It ran fast or slow according to the season, not at a pace adapted to year-round navigation; and along the river on either side lay dense wedands forests. That was what the Rhine used to look like, the river in which Goethe fished for salmon and hundreds of people panned for gold. The Rhine that became the supreme symbol of German identity was a new and different river. The modern traveler in 1750 would have found many other things that have since disappeared. Great expanses of high peat moor remained largely untouched, not yet traversed by canals and given over to crops. And in the uplands of the Eifel, the Sauerland, and the Harz were hundreds of valleys later drowned by dams. Their fields and villages had not yet been covered by water, just as the waterlogged high moors had not yet been covered by fields and villages. I have written about this great transformation in a recent book, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, andthe Making of Modern Germany. "Conquest " was the term favored by contemporaries. The tone shifted over the years, from sunny Enlightenment optimism, to the stern 19th-century belief in science and progress, to the technocratic certainties that marked most of the 20th century. But the underlying idea remained, that nature was an adversary to be tamed and manacled; it was better to fight nature than fellow humans. This reminds us that for much of the last 250 years the conquest of nature was a cause identified with the swords-into-ploughshares optimism of progressive November/December 2006 Historically Speaking opinion. Yet, as I have tried to show, large-scale schemes of hydrological improvement were often the byproduct or the handmaiden of war. And that was true long before the unleashing of largescale Nazi projects for Eastern Europe that combined technocratic hubris with racial contempt for the peoples whose "disorderly" land had been seized. Here, race, reclamation, and genocide were intertwined, rhetorically and on the ground. At home, too, the conquest of nature could be equally well...

A sustainable product needing a sustainable procurement commitment: the case of green waste in Wales

AbstractEuropean waste legislation aims to reduce the amount and type of waste that is sent to landfill. Hence member states are investigating alternatives, and trying to treat waste as a resource. In the UK there is a focus on producing compost from biodegradable waste. This emphasis is particularly strong in Wales, where strategy encourages the collection and composting of green garden waste.A survey has been conducted within the composting industry in Wales to determine the barriers that need to be overcome in order for green waste compost to become an accepted and viable product. The research investigates purchasing preferences, and identifies the important role of specifications in purchasing decisions.Welsh policy initiatives support the concept of sustainable development and encourage sustainable procurement. However, practical actions are required to turn these policies into practice. This study suggests how sustainable procurement initiatives could be used to facilitate the inclusion of green waste compost in contract specifications and hence enable public bodies to close the recycling loop. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

‘A Green and Sumptuous Garden’: Authenticity, Hybridity, and the Bali Tourism Project

The Bali Tourism Project, begun in the mid-1970s as a joint effort of the Indonesian central government, the World Bank, and the United Nations Development Program, has generally been portrayed as a success by the major actors involved in its implementation. Yet running parallel to the story of success is another story, a story of local residents' reactions to this ‘master plan’ and its attempts to control tourism ‘for the good’ of the Balinese. Most significantly, the logic of this plan – to create an enclave zone for wealthy tourists on the previously barren Bukit peninsula, who could then be shuttled around the island via a network of excursion roads that would allow carefully controlled access to an ‘authentic’ Bali – failed to take note of its own unintended consequences: what was (from a planning point of view) unplanned development undertaken by local residents as a means of gaining access to tourism benefits.

RECYCLING IN DORSET - AN EXAMPLE OF SUCCESSFUL PARTNERSHIP.

This paper tracks the history of a rapidly developing recycling strategy in Dorset which has led to a countywide rate of 27% recycling of household waste. This successful achievement has been the result of close liaison between the Dorset waste collection and disposal authorities and the cooperation and endeavours of their contractors. The paper describes the development of recycling initiatives following the formation of the Dorset Councils' Recycling Group in 1990 with the introduction of recycling bank sites and now widespread kerbside collection schemes following an investment by the contractor of more the £1 million into a material recycling facility. The biggest contribution to the recycling rate is the recovery of household waste from the county's civic amenity sites including the composting of green garden waste.

Gulf of Mexico Foraminiferal Size Data and Its Incorporation Into A Paleoecologic Zonafion Using The Paleoecologic Expert System (PALEX) : ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT Foraminiferal size data are presented from over 400 bottom samples from the Gulf of Mexico. Of the 74 common species investigated, 25 exhibit an increase in maximum size with increasing water depth. Qualitative terms such as small and large are assigned numerical values, corresponding to bathymetric zones. Quantifying size increases the number of key paleoecologic indicators available for interpretation. This is especially helpful for zonations based on species' upper depth limits. These key indicators were combined with our existing paleoecologic understanding to formulate consistent paleoecologic rules. These rules form the foundation of the Paleoecologic Expert System (PALEX), a PC based program. PALEX applies these expert rules to well data to rapidly produce a consistent paleoecologic interpretation. Interpretations can be displayed on a sample by sample basis, or averaged using a predetermined filter. Distribution of the key paleoecologic indicators within each sample can be plotted, and confidence levels assigned to the interpretation. Plotted alongside fossil abundance/diversity curves and integrated with electric log and seismic data, these interpretations can help identify sequence stratigraphic boundaries and system tracts. Examples from Green Canyon, Garden Banks, High Island, and Eugene Island are presented. End_of_Record - Last_Page 477-------

Impact of Cruciferous Trap Crops on Lepidopteran Pests of Cabbage in Hawaii

The objective of this study was to determine if trap crops of Indian mustard, Brassica juncea (L.) Czern., and ‘Tastie’ head cabbage, Brassica oleracea variety capitata L., grown alongside a main crop of ‘Scorpio’ head cabbage would significantly reduce lepidopteran pest numbers and improve yields on the main crop. For the 2 most economically important lepidopteran pests in the trials, diamondback moth, Plutella xylostella (L.), and imported cabbageworm, Pieris rapae (L.), significantly higher numbers were found on trap-cropped Scorpio than on monoculture Scorpio for certain key sampling dates. Numbers of Plutella xylostella were higher on the trap crops than on trap-cropped Scorpio for certain key dates. It appears that Indian mustard and Tastie cabbage acted effectively as attractants, but through an undetermined mechanism contamination of the adjacent Scorpio crop occurred. There were no significant differences in yield or marketability between monoculture Scorpio and trap-cropped Scorpio. Various changes in agroecosystem management might allow the attractiveness of the trap crops to be used in a beneficial manner. Indian mustard and Tastie cabbage show potential for use as trap crops for Hellula undalis (F.), cabbage looper, Trichoplusia ni (Hubner), and green garden looper, Chrysodeixis eriosoma (Doubleday). An understanding of the mechanisms that explain the movement of Lepidoptera within vegetationally diverse agroecosystems would be useful for on-farm implementation of this technique. Problems inherent in field experiments that compare the effects of different cropping systems on mobile insect populations are also discussed.

The Pastoral Influence on American Children's Literature

The Pastoral Influence on American Children's Literature David L. Russell (bio) Along the country roads alasBut waggoners few are seen,The world is topsy turvy turnedAnd all things go by steam,And all the past is passed awayLike to a moving dream, (qtd. in Clayre 89) So sang an anonymous ballad writer, lamenting the effects of industrialization on the American landscape in 1835. There was nothing new in this, of course. The common lot of humanity has always harbored an innate distrust of progress, as well as a nostalgic longing for an imagined idyllic world of the past. The literary expression of these common fears and longings is realized in the pastoral form, characterized by a search for simplicity and flight from complexity. The search typically takes us to a place (some version of mythical Arcadia) where we may leave behind the fervid trials of the civilized world (Marinelli 11). Theocritus is credited with inventing the pastoral form, although it is difficult to believe that he was the first to view city life as a degraded form of existence. The Elizabethans, even more than the ancients, were enamored of the pastoral as a literary device. Despite its rather ephemeral outward appearance, the pastoral, as Hallett Smith points out, "involved a set of values, and [had as its natural bend] a serious criticism of life" (64). But with the European discovery of the New World, the pastoral escape seemed more than a dream or a literary artifice. In fact, from the outset of European exploration and settlement in the New World, the American continent provided the pastoral with renewed possibilities. Leo Marx illustrates the fascination with those possibilities as they were expressed by writers including Shakespeare's use of American pastoral in The Tempest. Marx notes that for the Europeans, [End Page 121] America represented the chance for a new beginning: "In its simplest, archetypal form, the myth [of a new beginning] affirms that Europeans experience a regeneration in the New World. They become new, better, happier men—they are reborn" (228). For the Europeans, it was the American landscape that became "the symbolic repository of value of all kinds—economic, political, aesthetic, religious . . ." (228). There were those who actually believed that the pastoral life was attainable, but with significant differences: gone are the serene shepherds and the themes of love, which were exchanged for the rusticity of the farmer and the restorative quality of the rural landscape. Emerson echoed the pastoral hope when he wrote that The land is the appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantastic in our culture. The continent we inhabit is to be physic and food for our mind, as well as our body. The land, with its tranquilizing, sanative influences, is to repair the errors of a scholastic and traditional education, and brings us into just relations with men and things. (qtd. in Marx 237) However, the "sanative" landscape most frequently sought—in both American life and literature—is not the wild frontier untainted by civilization's advances but, in Marx's words, is "a rural landscape, a well-ordered green garden magnified to continental size" (141). Marx, continuing, explains that although it probably shows a farmhouse or neat white village, the scene is usually dominated by natural objects: in the foreground a pasture, a twisting brook with cattle grazing nearby, then a clump of elms on a rise in the middle distance and beyond that, way off on the western horizon, a line of dark hills. This is the countryside of the old Republic, a chaste, uncomplicated land of rural virtue. (141) This describes what Marx calls the "middle landscape," the American version of the pastoral ideal where labors are made pleasant by the measure of independence offered by the wide-open spaces of the vast American continent. Instead of idle, frolicking shepherds and shepherdesses, we have the American farmer, a diligent and earnest worker whose virtuous character is derived form his steady labor. It appears to have been Crevecoeur who first identified this middle landscape. He saw the process of westward expansion as resulting in three societal divisions: in the East, growing cities with increasing wealth and social...

Paleoecologic Implications of Chemoautotrophic Molluscan-Dominated Assemblages on the Louisiana Continental Slope

Dense chemoautotrophically based molluscan communities are common at sites of active petroleum seepage in the Green Canyon and Garden Banks lease blocks on the Louisiana upper continental slope. The presence of dense molluscan aggregations has important implications for paleoecology because the continental slope is generally though of as a geologic setting depauperate of macrofossils. Liquid and gaseous petroleum seepage, primarily along faults associated with salt diapirism, provides localized nutrient input which facilitates high molluscan productivity. Authigenic carbonate, formed due to methane oxidation, occurs at and below the sediment-water interface in areas of molluscan concentrations. Trophic structure of these bivalve-dominated communities is based on three separate carbon pathways: chemoautotrophy, utilizing either H{sub 2}S or CH{sub 4}, or autotrophy, utilizing organic food sources. The largest quantity of preservable molluscan biomass is produced by infaunal lucinid and thyasirid clams which utilize H{sub 2}S. Thyasirid and lucinid clams form extensive three-dimensional shell beds which can extend for several tens of meters. Second and third in terms of preservable biomass are vesicomyid clams and mytilid mussels which utilize H{sub 2}S and CH{sub 4} respectively. Vesicomyid clams form shell pavements at a smaller scale then the lucinid and thyasirid shell beds. The least amount of preservablemore » biomass is produced by autotrophs including trochid and nerite gastropods, limid bivalves, crabs, and starfish. Energy flow requirements for benthic communities on the oligotrophic continental shelf and slope settings of the northern Gulf of Mexico require a localized nutrient enrichment, such as a petroleum seep, to support dense concentrations of large individuals. This relationship of nutrient enrichment to enhanced biomass productivity probably also was a dominant factor in the formation of similar autochthonous benthic assemblages in the fossil record.« less

Control of Green Garden Looper, 1988

Abstract Green garden loopers were reared on Bio-Mixed 9000 in the laboratory; fifth instars were used in the test. One-inch-square ti-leaves were dipped in the insecticide solution and allowed to dry for 2 h on paper towels. After drying each square ti-leaf was placed in a 60- by 15-mm Petri dish on filter paper moistened with 0.5 ml distilled water. One green garden looper was placed in each dish. Each treatment consisted of 10 loopers and was replicated 3 times in time. Mortality was assessed at 1, 3, and 6 DAT. Artificial diet was added to the dishes in which the loopers consumed 100% of the ti-leaf.

Water, Wealth, and Power: A Case Study from Upper Mustang of Nepal

This paper examines the relationship between micro-social political institutions and unequal access to water which is ultimately molded by macro social world. The indigenously managed irrigation system existing in Dhee-Upper Mustang of Nepal is the manifestation or reflection of local kingship, village headmanship, institution of polyandry, property inheritance system, access to land, bikas (green garden), animal husbandry, state monarchical system (which is now abolished), modus operandi of NGOs/INGOs and governmental officials. The local unequal social political complexities led to age old indigenously managed irrigation system which is ultimately manufactured and protected by wider social structure. Dhee village Upper Mustang is a semi-arid Trans-Himalayan region in western part of Nepal which is known for its water scarcity. The indigenous or community-managed irrigation system existing in Dhee-Upper Mustang seems highly exploitative and power-ridden. DOI: 10.3126/opsa.v11i0.3033 Occasional Papers in Sociology and Anthropology Vol.11 2009 104-125

Marvell's Garden

On a first reading, seems to be a simple description of a delightful experience. Aware of the futility of human passion and ambition, the poet forsakes human society for the repose, innocence, and beauty which he finds in nature But if we look at the poem more carefully, we find that this innocent, green garden is delicious, and that there are, especially in the fifth stanza, obvious and vivid sexual images. Since The Garden is the Garden of Eden, there is no difficulty in understanding why it is beautiful, restful, and innocent. But why is it also sexual? What kind of garden is this where all the pleasures of passion can be enjoyed among trees and flowers, where plants are sexual and man is not? Despite the efforts of the critics, this central contradiction remains. William Empson, in what is at times a brilliant explication of the poem, finds that the poet desires only respose, that women are no longer interesting to him because nature is more beautiful. But if this is true, why should the garden possess, as Empson has pointed out, the same sexuality that is associated with women? William Klonsky in A Guide through the Garden sees the garden as a neo-Platonic Garden of Ideas. But again, despite many interesting analogies between Marvell and Plotinus (to which this study is indebted) no explanation is given as to why a poet who retreats from sexuality should create a garden filled with sexual symbols. Another critic of Marvell, Miss Wallerstein, comes close to finding the key to this contradiction by noting in an old Rabbinic legend . . that in Paradise before the Fall, Adam was an Androgyne. But Professor Wallerstein does not use this legend to interpret the poem. Therefore, the first part of this paper will show how this legend of the androgynous Adam solves the chief difficulty of the poem; and the second part of the paper will show that,