Albert Hofmann’s Garden
A brief account of the chemist’s writings on gardens and the natural world
As I know today, it was actually the light of the reality of being in the common basis of life together with the plants that triggered this enchantment in the open mind of a child.
– Albert Hofmann1
In 1934, at the age of 28, the Swiss chemist and discoverer of LSD Albert Hofmann was undergoing an existential, spiritual crisis. Unreality had set in, people around him seemed like wooden marionettes, meaninglessness proliferated. ‘My soul’, he later wrote, ‘was in a terrible state’.2
Sat brooding in his room one day, looking out on his garden, Hofmann’s gaze fell upon a tree: ‘A curious relationship effortlessly arose with this tree, which penetrated the vicious circle of muddied thoughts in my head and the path to healing was cleared.’ A thought emerged:
This tree is built in the same biochemical manner as you are; it is made up of cells with a nucleus that contains the hereditary factors and which is surrounded by a protective plasma hull, just like the cells of your body. It has come into…