Nick Ripatrazone looks at Letters Around a Garden by Rainer Maria Rilke, written to his close friend Antoinette, a gardener, a century ago.
‘ Aside from a few tulips, my little garden has not yet recited its Easter prayer,” wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke on Good Friday, 1924. His recipient was Antoinette de Bonstetten, a horticulture student at the University of Lausanne, whose skill might be useful to Rilke’s vision for the grounds of Château de Muzot, where the poet was halfway through a residency that would produce ambitious poems – yet leave the poet plagued with illness.
