Garden of the Hesperides

Also Known As: Greek: Hesperidon kepos, “garden of the daughters of evening”; also the Garden of Hera, the Orchard of Atlas; Latin: Horti Hesperidum
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: An orchard at the western rim of the world where a tree bears apples of gold, tended by the nymphs of evening and watched by a serpent that does not sleep.
Role in Mythos: It is Hera’s own garden, the keeping place of her wedding gift from the Earth, and the far goal of one of the last labours of Heracles.
Relation to Humans: Ordinary mortals never reach it, and the one hero who does needs a Titan’s help or a quiver of poisoned arrows. Later Greeks and Romans kept trying to pin it to real ground, from the coast of Libya to an estuary in Morocco.

By the time the Argonauts stumbled onto the sacred ground, parched after carrying their ship across the Libyan sand, the damage was a day old. The great serpent lay slumped against the trunk of the apple tree. Only the tip of its tail still twitched. Flies had settled and dried on the arrow wounds, where the poison of the Hydra was doing its slow work, and close by the nymphs of the place stood with their pale arms raised over their golden heads and wailed. Somebody in a lion skin had been through. The apples were gone.

That scene, from the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, is the closest any ancient poet comes to walking a reader into the Garden of the Hesperides, and it shows the place on the worst morning in its history. For most of its existence the garden is a rumour at the edge of the map. Hesiod puts it beyond the stream of Ocean, at the far limit of the earth toward Night, where the clear-voiced Hesperides look after the golden apples and the trees that bear them. Atlas stands nearby with the sky on his head and hands. Euripides, in a chorus that longs to escape there, adds an apple-growing shore where the lord of the sea lets no ship sail further, springs that flow with ambrosia, and the bed where Zeus lay with his bride.

The garden belongs to Hera. When she married Zeus, the Earth brought golden apples as a wedding present, and Hera liked them so well that she had them planted in her own orchard out by Atlas. In one version the daughters of Atlas kept helping themselves to the fruit, which is why she posted a guard. The guard is a snake, called Ladon by Apollonius, sometimes given a hundred heads and many voices, always given the same task. On a carved cedar tree once kept in Hera’s temple at Olympia it was shown coiled around the trunk. The nymphs sing. The dragon does not close its eyes. On an ordinary evening that is all that happens: the light goes down red over the water, the daughters of evening move among the branches, and the coils shift slightly on the bark.

Nobody agrees on where this is. Hesiod’s far west hardened over time into the coast of Africa, and Apollonius places the garden in Libya, near the lake of Triton. Virgil sets a temple of the Hesperides at the limit of Ocean and the setting sun, at the far end of Ethiopia, where a priestess feeds the dragon and minds the sacred boughs. Apollodorus contradicts the lot and says the apples were with Atlas among the Hyperboreans, which moves the garden to the far north. Ovid makes the orchard the property of Atlas himself, a king with gold leaves, gold branches and gold fruit, shut behind walls. Nobody could say where it was.

The tale that brings a visitor there is the labour of Heracles, the eleventh in the count of Apollodorus and the last in that of Diodorus. King Eurystheus wanted the apples fetched. Heracles first had to learn the way, which took a wrestling match with a sea god who kept changing shape. After that the stories split. In one, he follows the advice of Prometheus, stays out of the garden altogether, and asks Atlas to go in for him, taking the weight of the sky on his own shoulders while the Titan is away. Atlas comes back with three apples and no wish to resume his post. He offers to deliver the fruit himself. Heracles agrees, asks him to hold the sky for just a moment while he settles a pad on his head, picks up the apples, and leaves. In the other telling, the hero walks in, shoots the serpent, and takes what he came for. Hera is said to have set her dead guard among the stars.

The Argonauts arrive on the heels of that second version. As they come near, the grieving nymphs crumble to dust and earth where they stand. Orpheus prays to them, and out of the ground come first grass, then tall shoots, then three trees: a poplar, an elm and a willow. One of them, Aigle, speaks from her trunk. She describes a brutal man in a raw lion hide, with glaring eyes and an olive club, who killed the snake, and who, being thirsty, kicked a rock near the lake until water poured out of it. The sailors run to the spring and drink like cattle.

The theft does not hold. Eurystheus, handed the apples, gives them straight back to Heracles. Heracles gives them to Athena, and Athena carries them home to the garden, because it was not lawful for them to rest anywhere else. The fruit of that tree has one address.

Greeks who preferred their myths with the wonder taken out had a neat way through. The same Greek word can mean apples or sheep, so Diodorus reports that the famous golden apples were flocks of fine golden-fleeced sheep in a part of Libya called Hesperitis, and that the dragon was a shepherd named Dracon, a fierce man who killed rustlers. The Romans went looking for the ground. Pliny the Elder places the gardens at Lixus on the Atlantic coast of Mauretania, where a tidal inlet winds inland in loops that people of his day took for the original of the serpent. An island in the channel held an altar of Hercules. Of the grove that bore the gold, he says, nothing was left but some wild olive trees. He reports a rival claim, too, a sacred grove by a river near Berenice in Cyrenaica, the city once called Euesperides after the nymphs.

The garden’s gift is confinement of a splendid kind. It keeps a treasure of the gods at the one point on earth furthest from human hands, behind an ocean, a Titan, a choir and a sleepless snake, and it pulls its fruit back even after a successful robbery. Its springs run with the food of the gods. Evening is permanent there, or near enough.

Its limits show in every version of the labour. Distance is most of its defence, and distance yields to a man told the road. The serpent is called immortal by one author and is shot dead in another. The nymphs can sing and mourn but cannot stop anyone. And the place will not stay put. It sits in the west, in Libya, in the north, under a mountain, on a Moroccan river bend, wherever the known world happens to end that century.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Garden of the Hesperides?

The Garden of the Hesperides is the orchard of the goddess Hera in Greek mythology, set at the western edge of the world. A tree there bears golden apples, which the Earth gave Hera as a wedding present. The Hesperides, the nymphs of evening, tend the garden, and a serpent called Ladon guards the tree.

Where is the Garden of the Hesperides?

Ancient authors disagree about where the Garden of the Hesperides lies. Hesiod puts it beyond the river Ocean in the far west, near Atlas. Apollonius of Rhodes places it in Libya, Apollodorus places it among the Hyperboreans in the far north, and Pliny the Elder reports claims for Lixus in Morocco and for Berenice in Cyrenaica.

Who guards the Garden of the Hesperides?

The Hesperides and a great serpent guard the Garden of the Hesperides. The serpent, named Ladon by Apollonius of Rhodes, coils around the apple tree and never sleeps. In one story Hera set it there because the daughters of Atlas kept taking the apples.

How did Heracles get the golden apples from the garden?

There are two versions. In one, Heracles holds up the sky while Atlas goes into the Garden of the Hesperides and brings out three apples, then tricks Atlas into taking the sky back. In the other, Heracles enters the garden himself, kills the serpent with poisoned arrows, and takes the apples.

What happened to the golden apples after Heracles took them?

The golden apples went back to the Garden of the Hesperides. Eurystheus returned them to Heracles, Heracles gave them to Athena, and Athena carried them home. It was not lawful for the apples to be kept anywhere else.