Thank the gods: Nolan steers clear of Homer’s epic gardens in The Odyssey

I have spent weeks building a fence in my mind’s eye. It is a Hollywood-proof fence to protect three of the world’s most important gardens alive in Homer’s Odyssey. I have not yet seen Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey, but others have reassured me. There is not a garden to be seen in it. The characters who immortalise its top two gardens are not even cast in the film. Thank you, Nolan, for not trampling on hallowed ground: you simply left it out. 

The first of the three gardens is in the Odyssey’s fifth book when the god Hermes flies down to visit Calypso and tell her to let Odysseus go home. Film-goers will marvel at lovely Charlize Theron who plays the divine nymph Calypso, but unlike Hermes they will not marvel at the botanical beauty around her cave. The film sets her in a blank sort of desert. In the poem Calypso had no need to rewild her garden. It was a natural wilderness, wet and lush.

Calypso’s cave is approached through meadows of ‘selinon’ or wild celery, sometimes mistaken for parsley, which thrives on damp Calypso’s island, Ogygia, is in Neverland and never existed in a real sea. Homer’s poetic eye is exact nonetheless. He makes Hermes marvel at its tree-scape of alders and poplars, surely the ones we call black, as black alders and black poplars grow in wet ground in Greece. Sweet-scented cypress is growing with them too, presumably evergreen Cupressus sempervirens, which will indeed grow in damp ground as well as on dry slopes. A heavily fruiting vine frames the entrance to Calypso’s cave, the one in which she was bedding reluctant Odysseus. It is approached through “soft meadows of violets and selinon”. 

This selinon is sometimes mistaken for parsley, but it is wild celery, Apium graveolens, which grows up to 2ft high and also thrives on damp. It is often a biennial, lasting for only two years, but among the sweet violets it would easily have sown and perpetuated itself, even without a goddess’s help. Calypso never had to worry about watering it. Four springs of clear water, facing in opposite directions, watered the ground for her. Her flowery landscape has a special resonance for gardeners who are burning in this summer’s drought.

Another island stop takes Odysseus to the palace garden of Alcinous, king of Phaeacia, where fruit trees produce pears, apples and figs all year round © British Museum Prepping for the film, I have just noticed a problem. In the poem, Calypso is singing and weaving at her loom with a golden shuttle when Hermes arrives. Scented wood is burning in her hearth, logs of cedar and what Homer calls “thyon”. Later Greek botanists located thyon in North Africa and Libya, applying the name to the citron tree whose finely grained wood was so highly prized by rich Romans as a wood for tabletops that they made it extinct. If Calypso was burning citron on her fire, she had already begun its eco-decline. As a goddess, she might have brought it all the way from North Africa and Homer, her poet, might have known a North African tree, even in c.720BC. I wonder, however, if by thyon he referred to something else, a type of juniper perhaps, before the citron tree was known to Greeks. 

Odysseus leaves Calypso’s island for another, legendary Phaeacia, which is also in Neverland, but not in Nolan’s film. His meeting there with young Nausicaa, the king’s daughter, and then his farewell to her are episodes of the highest humanity, but the film ignores her too. Guided by Athena, he is taken by Homer to her father Alcinous’s palace and enters the hedged garden in front of it. It is a wonder, the most admired garden in poetry and fiction for the next two thousand years. Like Calypso, Alcinous would never be bothered by hosepipe bans in summer as two springs run in its centre throughout the year.

Pomegranates, pears, apples and figs grow in its big orchard and miraculously bear fruit in every month, like trees in the Christian idea of Paradise or the counters of modern supermarkets with chilled and imported fruits all year round. Olives ripen too, a rare reference in Homer to olives as food, and grapes are being dried to be turned into wine. Beyond their vines lie planted beds, “prasiai”, which have a “gleam”. In other contexts prasiai can refer to flower beds, but in Alcinous’s productive garden they are probably beds of vegetables. I cannot agree with those who have argued that they are beds of leeks, as if Alcinous anticipated that leek-loving Welshman, Shakespeare’s Owen Glendower.

This marvellous garden is described in the present tense. One great scholar has argued that this tense shows that the garden is a later insertion which Homer moved from another context, perhaps a speech. I do not believe that notion, either: the garden is described in the present as if it is still alive in Neverland, though it is not on general release on Imax screens this month.

The third garden caps it and rounds off major themes in the poem, though Nolan left it out. It, too, is an orchard, the one in which Odysseus finds his elderly father Laertes after slaying the suitors of his wife Penelope. Without his son, old Laertes had withdrawn in grief and distress to his orchard far beyond the palace on Ithaca. It is there that his long-lost son Odysseus watches him at work. 

One of the poem’s last great scenes of recognition takes place in the garden of Odysseus’s father, Laertes, and is of the son identifying the trees his father named for him as a child. ‘Odysseus Observing Laertes’ by Jan Styka (1858–1925) Like Laertes I have avenues of pears in my garden, ornamental Chanticleer pears, however, not varieties grown for fruit. Like Laertes I garden there in scruffy clothes, though without his humble cap of goatskin on my head. Laertes wears leather guards on his legs, to the puzzlement of archaeologists who consider that they are versions of the metal greaves worn as armour but not yet attested when Homer composed. I, too, wear leather knee patches, without needing armour as a model: they are the knee pads sold for gardeners who kneel or work among thorns. A Roman reader assumed that Laertes was spreading manure round his pears. Actually he was scratting on the soil, just as I do while wondering if my excellent son, too, will return, not from the fall of Troy but from travels round investments in young tech companies throughout the world.

Odysseus “tries out” his father by telling him one last tale of lies about his own identity, but then he reveals who he is. His father wants proof, so Odysseus recalls to him how once he took him out as a boy into the orchard and named the fruit trees which would one day be his. Pride of Aphrodite? Penelope’s Wonder? I think Laertes just pointed to the trees involved, but Odysseus remembered how many. It is the poem’s last great scene of recognition, one based on trees in an orchard.

Like Laertes, I have avenues of pears in my garden, ornamental Chanticleer pears, Pyrus calleryana — though unlike him, I refrain from wearing a goatskin cap while gardening © GAP Photos/Elke Borkowski

The scene has been trailed in advance and is surely Homer’s own. I will not spoil its poignancy, which is heightened by Laertes not yet recognising Odysseus, but remembering him from so long ago and wondering “if he was ever really so”. In the Iliad, the earlier poem, Homer had already invented moving pictures, described for us as scenes which the god Hephaestus was crafting on a metal shield for Achilles and which Homer’s poetry brings to life as we look on. His eye so often seems filmic before its time, using close-ups, long shots and other tricks of style. He would be fascinated by watching a film, but he would never call it “the” Odyssey, his own masterpiece, one so much richer and subtler.

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