Gardening is not about those mythical ‘green fingers’. Gardeners know that the plants, the trees, the staff, and the grounds are the identity they create for themselves by doing every single thing that can be done, over and over, as the year wheels about. The peculiar boon of growing into your garden is, since time immemorial, that you live the life-cycle a million times, through the plants; you have the best chance of anyone to grab the moral for your own life, wherever you knock around. Ever since Homer wound up the Odyssey so touchingly with Laertes in his idyllic plot on Ithaca, ‘hoeing around’ the plants until his son came home to take care of his family, ‘getting to know vines and counting up the fruit-trees’ has imaged an idealized existence with hearts and values in the right place, an islet of self at one with life on the land, the ‘island’ politics of the self at one with itself.

Book 1 of the Letters ends by showcasing Seneca as senectus. (He had in fact recently retired in his mid sixties.) He proudly suppresses the location of the location of ‘my just-out-of-town property’ (in suburbanum meum, 12.1), where he comes to image ‘my senility’, in the form of ‘an ancient manor’ that ‘grew in my hands’, ‘its stone ∼ my age’ (uillam ueterem … haec uilla inter manus meas creuit … aetatis meae saxa, 12.1). But this opening tableau does showcase reportage, at l(e)ast.