Gardening in Exile: Place, Identity and Ecology in the Poetry of Michael Hamburger

‘Seit fast vierzig Jahren ist das Gärtnern neben dem Schreiben meine Hauptbeschäftigung’, Michael Hamburger wrote in 1994, and around this time commentators began to refer to him as a gardener as well as a translator, poet, literary critic and memoirist. However, while the role which gardens and gardening played in his life has been acknowledged, their importance for his poetry remains largely unexplored. I argue in this article that gardening served as therapy for Hamburger, whose experience of exile was outwardly less traumatic than that of many other refugees from the Third Reich, but whose life was marked by disruption and linguistic and cultural disorientation, following from his move to England at the age of nine, and that it was a way of making him at home there. However, my principal concern is with the meanings which gardening acquires in his poems, and the links with his quest for identity, his ecological concerns and a particular form of place-belonging. I seek to show that Hamburger’s experience as an émigré led him to develop conceptions of gardening and place-belonging that prefigured the understanding of the human-nature relationship demanded by our situation in the twenty-first century.