Philippa Foot: Thinking in Gardens, Loving in Letters

October 3, 1920 / October 3, 2010

On this day, Philippa Foot was both born and died — her life beginning and ending on the same autumn date, as though the calendar itself wished to bookend her story neatly.

A philosopher by trade, Philippa is remembered for her clarity, her sharp wit, and her radical insistence that philosophy must be rooted in the natural world.

“In moral philosophy,” she once said, “it is useful, I believe, to think about plants.”

Plants, dear reader!

Not Plato or Kant or Descartes, but the humble plants that bend in our gardens and scatter on our paths.

One can almost hear a gardener murmuring with delight: “At last, a philosopher who knows the difference between a weed and a flower — and admits that both belong in the same bed.”

Philippa was born into a family already touched by history. Her mother, Esther Cleveland, was the daughter of Grover Cleveland — the first presidential child to be born in the White House.

Yet while others might have basked in the glow of ancestry, Philippa turned instead to questions of goodness, virtue, and human flaws.

She saw morality not as a divine decree, but as something living and rooted in nature itself. Human vices, she believed, were no different than defects in a plant: a shriveled leaf here, a crooked stem there, inevitable yet instructive.

Of philosophers she once joked:

“You ask a philosopher a question and after he or she has talked for a bit, you don't understand your question anymore.”

And yet she refused to be that sort of philosopher. She preferred brevity, clarity, and — dare we say it — beauty. Her work was not meant to confuse but to illuminate, the way sunlight pours through a canopy and makes plain the smallest details of the forest floor.

But if her philosophy was remarkable, her friendships were the stuff of novels. At Oxford, Philippa met Iris Murdoch, the brilliant novelist and fellow philosopher. The two women became romantically involved in the 1960s — a fact revealed only after Philippa’s death — and though their relationship waxed and waned, their bond endured through letters as tender as any love poem.

On July 8, 1968, Iris wrote to Philippa from Inverness, where she was staying with friends. Her words read like pressed wildflowers, delicate but indelible:

“I had forgotten the beauty of this place. The Highlands are a vast rock garden — hundreds of kinds of tiny things flower and the variety of the woodland — it has no horrible Schwarzwald look.

Much walking has been done and a little swimming but it's damn cold.

Not a soul in many days of walking have met no one, and seen no one over those vast hillsides.

Do you suffer from chronic anxiety?

I think not. It is a vice, a form of deep fear.

I'd like to talk to you about this sometime.

Write to me. [...]

Much love,
I”

Here, the great Iris Murdoch confesses that the Scottish Highlands are nothing less than a “vast rock garden,” each flower a whisper of eternity.

One cannot help but imagine Philippa reading these lines with a half-smile, as if the wild thyme and saxifrages of Scotland had been enlisted as couriers of affection.

Vita Sackville-West might have leaned over her quill and remarked: “When philosophers fall in love, they do not send roses — they send descriptions of lichens.”

Nearly two decades later, in 1985, Iris wrote again to Philippa, her words brimming with sentimentality and longing:

“I imagine you now in the sun, surrounded by those magic trees, in a garden of flowers, looking out upon the glittering dolphin-crowded sea.

Dear old Europe, poor old Europe.

(Dear old planet, poor old planet.)”

What a vision: Philippa, imagined in her garden, bathed in sunlight, encircled by flowers, gazing upon a sea alive with dolphins.

It is not merely a letter; it is a portrait painted in words, an image of a woman transfigured by love, philosophy, and nature.

One can almost smell the salt air, hear the rustle of leaves, and feel the weight of affection folded into the page. And behind it all, a garden writer would surely sigh: “Even philosophers, it seems, cannot resist turning gardens into metaphors for love.”

Philippa Foot’s legacy lies in more than her ideas. It lies in her insistence that goodness is not abstract but organic, woven into nature itself. It lies in her humor, her brevity, her refusal to let philosophy wither into irrelevance. And it lies, most tenderly, in the letters exchanged with Iris Murdoch — fragments of intimacy where gardens, seas, and flowers carried the burden of what words could not quite say aloud.

So let us remember Philippa this way: not only as the philosopher who told us to think of plants, but as the woman who was herself imagined, decades later, as a garden — sunlit, flowering, and alive with love.