Hesperides immortal as long as he touched his mother, Gaia, the earth. Heracles killed Antaeus by holding him aloft and crushing him in a bearhug. Herodotus claims that Heracles stopped in Egypt, where King Busiris decided to make him the yearly sacrifice, but Heracles burst out of his chains. Finally making his way to the Garden of the Hesperides, Heracles tricked Atlas into retrieving some of the golden apples for him, by offering to hold up the heavens for a little while (Atlas was able to take them as, in this version, he was the father or otherwise related to the
Greek gardens and apples glowing red,<br> succulent figs and olives swelling sleek and dark.<br> And the yield of all these trees will never flag or die,<br> neither in winter nor in summer, a harvest all year round." The description is beloved of writers on gardens, nevertheless. No such gardens were known to Homer's contemporaries, as far as archaeologists can discern, any more than palaces like Alcinous', whose very doors were of bronze. The gardens of Greek myth were "untended" gardens, maintained in orderly fashion simply because order, "themis", was in the nature of things, as in the garden of the Hesperides, which