Not such a rosy outlook ... the bust of Goethe in Weimar Castle. Photograph: Jens Meyer/AP

I was reading Andrew Marvell's The Garden the other day and it got me wondering; what is this thing with poets and gardens? Is it just simply that poets see themselves as creating order out of the chaos of language as gardeners make order out of the chaos of nature, or is there more to it than that?

Well, yes there is. To begin with, Marvell's garden is intended to recall prelapsarian Eden. It is, admittedly, a particularly misogynistic view of "that happy garden-state, / While man there walked without a mate". But leaving that aside, there can be little doubt that the twin poles of Eden and Gethsemane lend a particular symbolic weight to the place of the garden in the work of Christian poets. Unsurprisingly, the paradisiacal garden also features in Islamic poetry; for example, it is an important setting for Rumi's Masnavi I Ma'navi. Clearly, one function of the garden in poetry is related to this rich tradition of religious symbolism that is available to the poet.

On the other hand, many poets seem to have been at home in gardens of more earthly delights. Think Horace in his villa or Omar Khayyam and his "bury me by some sweet Garden-side". This idea of the garden of pleasure underpins Medieval European poems like the Roman de la Rose and continues, in English, into the 18th century in the writings of poets like Alexander Pope, who built a celebrated garden at his home in Twickenham.

Actually, Pope is an interesting case. His most celebrated poem on gardening is Moral Essay IV, an epistle to Lord Burlington. The poem can be read as much as a poetic as a horticultural aesthetic; art is to imitate nature, but nature bounded and made civil. Perhaps Pope was seeking to have poetry recognised as a gentlemanly pursuit in the same was as gardening was? One way or another, the trope of the gentleman gardener was so well established that Pope's contemporary Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was able to satirise it in an epistolary poem of her own.

While this notion of the garden as symbol of civilization is common to most poetry up to and including Pope, it was something the Romantics rejected. They kicked open the garden gate and set off to tramp across moor and fell in search not so much of nature untrammelled by the gardener's art as their own image reflected back to them in nature's mirror.

This Romantic attitude got a bit swamped in the rising tide of middle-class Victorian affluence. Gardens and gardening, albeit on a smaller scale, became much more widely available and the garden was increasingly viewed as an extension of the domestic sphere. The dream was of a cottage garden with its herbaceous borders and roses trained around the door.

And what roses. This age-old symbol of dynastic conflict, religious ecstasy and sensual pleasure was systematically run through an iterative process of unnatural selection to provide an ever-expanding range of shades for a Pre-Raphaelite exterior design palette, a process reflected in poems like Christina Rossetti's An October Garden.

The magpie Modernists found that they had a huge range of garden imagery and symbolism to play with. Poems like Mina Loy's Anglo-Mongrel and the Rose and Injudicious Gardening[xiv] by Marianne Moore show a willingness to play with the new range of rose meanings. And what are we to make of Moore's "imaginary gardens with real toads in them" or Gertrude Stein's "a rose is a rose is a rose"? And then, of course, there's Eliot's use of the rose garden in Burnt Norton, blending religious, secular and personal connotations to create something truly new.

But of all the 20th century gardener poets Ian Hamilton Finlay and his Little Sparta must wear the crown. Here there is no distinction between garden and poem, the two are completely intertwined. Little Sparta is the first work of art in the Western tradition that might be described as horti-poetical.

Now, I'm not asking you to build a Little Sparta, but I would like to see your garden-inspired poems. Whole gardens, real or imaginary; hybrid roses in tubs on the balcony or formal flowerbeds in trim lawns; plaster gnomes or toads in ponds; sowing, planting or harvesting: the choice is yours. The sun is in the garden now, let's go out and write.