The Garden of Cyrus

The Garden of Cyrus, or The Quincuncial Lozenge, or Network Plantations of the Ancients, naturally, artificially, mystically considered, is a discourse by Sir Thomas Browne. First published in 1658, along with its diptych companion Urn-Burial, in modern times it has been recognised as Browne's major literary contribution to Hermetic wisdom.[1][2]

Frontispiece to The Garden of Cyrus (1658)

Ostensibly an essay promoting the use of the quincunx in planting trees, whatever the value of its wilder flights of fancy, it was in that respect entirely practical and conventional, as the planting, especially of orchards, in multiples of quincunxes, that is to say staggered straight rows, was already normal practice, and, as Browne says, long had been, as the most effective pattern for maximizing sunlight on each tree.

Written during a time when restrictions on publishing became more relaxed during Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, The Garden of Cyrus (1658) is Browne's contribution to a "boom period" decade of interest in esoterica in England.[3] Browne's discourse is a Neoplatonic and Neopythagorean vision of the interconnection of art and nature via the inter-related symbols of the number five and the quincunx pattern, along with the figure X and the lattice design.[4] Its fundamental quest was of primary concern to Hermetic philosophy: proof of the wisdom of God, and demonstrable evidence of intelligent design. The Discourse includes early recorded usage of the words "prototype" and "archetype" in English.

The critic Edmund Gosse (d. 1928) complained that "gathering his forces it is Quincunx, Quincunx, all the way until the very sky itself is darkened with revolving Chess-boards", while conceding that "this radically bad book contains some of the most lovely paragraphs which passed from an English pen during the seventeenth Century".[5]