On his latest record, I Know a Garden, Edwin Raphael tends to a dense and wild tapestry of dreams and memories. Lush chamber pop blossoms forth radiantly, rollingly, with the same kind of care and attention that sculpted the world’s most enveloping recreations of Eden. The Montreal-based artist’s early EPs and his world-building 2023 long-player Warm Terracotta found him exploring the shores of an island that had come to him in dream after dream. In the surrounding waters on I Know a Garden, Raphael begins his move inward, toward a green place at the centre of the island that holds both the roots of his life and the buds of possibility that grow from them. It’s the kind of world within a world that provides fertile ground for an artist who recognizes the complexity of selfhood and the strange sweetness of being.

“I wanted to find the safest spot on the island, which is this garden,” Raphael says. “I also have to leave the garden and forage to bring life back in order to grow the garden. But I can always come back to feel safe if I need to. I Know a Garden is a palace built from childhood memories, made of tiny myths my parents would tell me and this spirituality that I grew up with but hadn't thought about for years.”

One of those tiny myths was such an uncanny memory that Raphael nearly didn’t trust it happened. While he grew up mostly in Dubai, his family regularly went back to India during the summers to spend time in the house his mother grew up in, deep in the forest. He could’ve sworn that during one of those summers, his mother gently caught a dragonfly and tied a little piece of string to its tail, then led the insect to pick up tiny pebbles from Raphael and his sister’s palms. He kept it mostly to himself, believing it was maybe a dream, until his sister found an old video tape of the moment.

“‘Hymn for a Dragonfly’ encapsulates the time I spent in that forest,” Raphael says. “How wondrous it was, and how big of an influence it had on my imagination.”

Raphael crafted the airy softness of “Hymn for a Dragonfly,” like the rest of the album, with the utmost care, partly in hopes that the experience may inspire a listener to seek or find a moment of pure presence with the environment that surrounds them.

Engaging with the garden and its living things offers this possibility of pure presence, an idyll experience. In her recent book The Garden Against Time, British author Olivia Laing writes about the roots of the word paradise. With its origins in Avestan, a language spoken in Persia around 4500 years ago, paradise comes from pairidaēza, which means ‘walled garden.’ Laing notes that this means our concept of Eden, the Earthly paradise, arose from the sublimity of the garden. “It was the garden that came first, heaven trailing in its wake,” she writes.

This is an important current that runs throughout I Know a Garden: it is possible, with care and attention—with presence—to cultivate paradise in reality. In fact, we are already there. We just need to do the work of seeing and uncovering it.

An intimate understanding of this pervades the album, and wonder blooms all over it. It’s in the propulsive opener “First Time on Earth,” which assumes an extraterrestrial perspective to emphasize the miracle of our planet (“everything’s uncertain, but it’s beautifully designed,” Raphael sings). And it’s in the gentle strums of “Mosaic in the Sun,” when Raphael compares our fragmentary selves to sunlight refracting.

But there’s also wonder in bittersweetness and difficulty, as on the aquatic “Shame You Swim So Well,” about not being able to understand the way another body moves through an activity; or the thoughtful “Moonstruck,” when Raphael sings about the social barriers inherent in being a person of colour, an identity that wasn’t chosen but gifted. “There’s a strange comfort in surrendering to what it is,” Raphael says. “This feeling is what makes me feel whole, in the end. It’s what makes me, me.”

I Know a Garden ends on the warm, finger-picked lines of “Sunbeam,” a meditation on the movement of a single day. It’s a fitting, thoughtful finale for a record concerned to the utmost with this activity of tending—to the Earth and to each other.

“We get this little sunbeam, this little bit of the day when everything is alive and lush, and then we go to sleep until we get to do it all over again,” Raphael says. “It kind of ends with a lullaby—you had this wonderful day full of awe and wonder, and now you get to rest and forage again tomorrow and see what else you’ll learn.”