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John Peter's Arcadia And Endless Struggle

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Arcadia and Endless Struggle
What drives Peter’s obsession with gardens? During his narrative, Peter interlaces an approximately present day account of his experience in an elderly home attempting to construct a garden with an explanation of his fateful trip to the Seven Maidens. On the surface, I find his story of the elderly home to be inconsequential — only his gift to Jasper at the end advances the novel’s factual plot. I initially passed off old-Peter’s reflections on constructing a garden as the bored journalling of a possibly senile old man. However, Peter’s outright passion for gardens invited me to examine his writing further. Interestingly, his borderline lust for gardens seems to evolve over the course of his life. How does Peter’s language around gardens change over time, and what does this reveal about Peter?
I think that at first, Peter seems to see wondrous gardens as a call to adventure. While a student at Oxford examining images of exotic gardens, his “entire being trembled with hunger… this was where [he] would find [his] paradise, [his] tropical Arcadia, [his] vision of perfection” (page 271). I believe that initially, Peter views these gardens as a utopian destination to be sought out and quested for — he pursues them by travelling thousands of miles from his home in search of this paradise. Furthermore, his conceives of his destination as Arcadia — a mythological reference which implies both harmony with nature and unattainable utopia. However, Peter’s

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