# Garden

Explore the Garden as a sacred symbol of growth, creation, and human potential through the lens of Mormon Transhumanist thought and theology.

[Image: In the Genesis account, God plants a garden “eastward in Eden” and places Adam there “to dress it and to keep it,” the first sanctuary from which all creation’s story unfolds.]

Fundamentally, a garden is a bounded sanctuary—a plot of ground deliberately enclosed and cultivated for life, fruitfulness, and divine pleasure. The Hebrew *gan* derives from a root meaning “to defend” or “to protect,” while the Greek *kēpos* similarly designates a fenced and tended enclosure; both terms presuppose a sacred boundary and a designated keeper or priest. Read merely on the surface, the garden of scripture is synonymous with Eden—the primordial temple lost at the dawn of mortality and promised again at the eschaton. Yet, the prophetic and apostolic voices of scripture diligently plant gardens throughout the grand narrative in between: within the inner landscape of the soul, amidst the bitter realities of exile, throughout the sweeping covenant history of Israel, and ultimately, at the victorious tomb of Christ.

The poets and prophets of Israel frequently invoke the garden as a profound typology of the human soul—initially guarded as a sacred reserve, and subsequently poured out in consecrated service.

In the Song of Solomon, the bridegroom describes his beloved through rich temple imagery: “A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates.” In response, she invokes the breath of heaven to “blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out” (Song of Solomon 4:12–13, 16). The term rendered “orchard” is *pardes*, a Persian loanword signifying a walled park; significantly, its Greek equivalent, *paradeisos*, is the very word employed by the Septuagint for the Garden of Eden. It is deeply instructive that this sealed, Edenic sanctuary petitions for its fragrance to be dispersed outward. Isaiah expands this localized image into a universal mandate. To those who “draw out [their] soul to the hungry,” the Lord promises, “thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not” (Isaiah 58:10–11). In this prophetic vision, the garden becomes the consecrated individual whose abundance sustains the community.

## Planting Gardens in Babylon

[Image: Jeremiah tells the exiles to plant gardens and eat the fruit “multigenerationally,” turning agriculture into a long-term act of hope.]

Jeremiah’s pastoral letter to the captives in Babylon elevates agriculture to an act of profound faith in a foreign land—an act that currently resonates with our technological aspirations toward other worlds.

To the exiles, whom false prophets had dangerously assured of a rapid deliverance, Jeremiah commanded a multi-generational commitment: “Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them” (Jeremiah 29:5). To plant a garden is to enact a profound hope; it is to expect to remain for the harvest. In our era, Mormon transhumanists envision the staggering task of transporting entire ecosystems to terraform and cultivate new earths. Any such extra-planetary settlement must inherently begin as an exile’s garden, tasked with feeding its inhabitants and regenerating their very breath. 

A closed-loop garden, severed from the macro-systems of the Earth, must independently replicate every function the Earth provides—a humbling reminder that we have not yet mastered the intricate, divine stewardship required to perfectly sustain an enclosed world.

## The Lord of the Vineyard

The most expansive parable in the Book of Mormon masterfully portrays God as a master gardener who prunes, digs, grafts, and ultimately grieves over His vineyard.

In the sweeping allegory of the prophet Zenos, preserved by Jacob, the house of Israel is depicted as a tame olive tree planted in the Lord’s vineyard. As it falls into decay, its divine Master meticulously prunes it, digs about its roots, grafts in wild branches, and strategically relocates its natural branches to distant corners of the vineyard. Careful commentators have demonstrated how flawlessly this allegory tracks with the realities of ancient Near Eastern olive culture, but it dwells with equal poignancy on the divine pathos of the Master. When the fruit inevitably corrupts, “the Lord of the vineyard wept, and said unto the servant: What could I have done more for my vineyard?” (Jacob 5:41). Grafting—the intimate fusing of a branch from one tree into the life-giving root of another—is a sophisticated horticultural technique, and the God of the allegory employs it unsparingly to rescue His creation. Latter-day Saints rightly recognize the final, urgent season of this allegory as a typological blueprint of their own dispensation, an era in which “the servants did go and labor with their mights; and the Lord of the vineyard labored also with them” (Jacob 5:72).

## Gethsemane and the Garden Tomb

John’s Gospel deliberately frames both the agonizing descent and the triumphant resurrection of Jesus within the sacred precincts of a garden, culminating in the risen Christ being mistaken for the gardener.

It is unique to John’s account that the site of the arrest is explicitly identified as such: Jesus “went forth with his disciples over the brook Cedron, where was a garden, into the which he entered” (John 18:1). Synoptic accounts identify the location as Gethsemane—derived from the Aramaic for “oil press”—and Latter-day Saints, who locate the profound onset of the Atonement there, have long recognized the typological resonance between the crushing of the olives and the Savior’s incomprehensible suffering. Read in tandem with Zenos’s allegory, this scene reveals the very Lord who wept and labored over His olive trees now being pressed in an olive garden for their salvation.

John further notes that “in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre.” On the morning of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene, weeping at the vacant tomb, failed to recognize the risen Jesus, “supposing him to be the gardener” (John 19:41; 20:15). John’s specific Greek term, *kēpouros* (“garden-keeper”), appears nowhere else in the New Testament. The first Adam had been placed in a primordial garden to dress and keep it; commentators since late antiquity have rightly recognized the presence of the Second Adam here, standing in a renewed garden on the first day of a new creation. Mary’s eyes were opened, and she knew Him, only when the Master Gardener called her by name.

## Cultivating the Cosmic Garden

The primordial mandate given to Adam and Eve to "dress and keep" their localized sanctuary was never rescinded; rather, it has steadily expanded into a cosmic imperative. For the religious transhumanist, the tools of modern science, biotechnology, and ecological engineering are not secular intrusions into the sacred, but the very implements of this ongoing priesthood labor. We are called to participate actively in the literal transfiguration of the Earth—curing disease, halting biological decay, and perhaps one day terraforming barren, celestial frontiers into vibrant, life-sustaining biospheres.

Christ’s triumphant emergence from the garden tomb was the prototype of this ultimate harvest. He conquered death not to abandon the physical world, but to redeem and elevate it. If the first creation began within a single, walled enclosure, the new creation envisions a universe meticulously cultivated into a celestial *pardes*. By consecrating our accelerating technological capacities to the work of healing, life extension, and planetary renewal, we join the Master Gardener in His most profound labor: ensuring that the whole of creation, once fallen, blossoms infinitely as the eternal dwelling place of God and humanity.

*See also*: [Eden](/topical-guide/eden), [Grow](/topical-guide/grow), [Nature/Natural](/topical-guide/naturenatural), [Rewilding](/topical-guide/rewilding), [Solarpunk](/topical-guide/solarpunk)