Crossing the Creek to Fetch Water
When looking downward, I gaze upward. This was how the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) described one of the allegorical sculptures that decorated his manor house Uraniborg on the island of Hven. But the words also fit Brahe himself. Uraniborg contained not only an observatory where he could follow the movements of the planets in the sky, but it was also the centre of a stringently designed garden, which among other things consisted of ingeniously landscaped flowerbeds, many of them in star-shaped patterns. Here Tycho Brahe cultivated herbs with which he could do chemical or alchemical experiments in Uraniborg’s basements....