The Garden of the Hesperides

The Hesperides are the Nymphs of the Evening, daughters of Atlas in most accounts, and their garden lies at the far west where the sun goes down. In it grows a tree of golden apples, a wedding gift from Gaia to Hera, and because the nymphs helped themselves Hera set the dragon Ladon around the trunk — a hundred heads, never all asleep at once.

Fetching the apples was the eleventh labour of Heracles, and the first problem was that nobody knew where the garden was. He had to catch the shape-shifting sea-god Nereus and hold him through every transformation until he gave directions, which is a labour inside a labour.

How he took them depends on who is telling it. In one version he shot Ladon and picked them himself. In the better version he did not enter at all: he offered to hold up the sky for Atlas, whose daughters they were, and let Atlas fetch them — then tricked him into taking the weight back.

The apples could not stay. They were sacred, so Athena returned them to the garden once Eurystheus had seen them. It is the only labour whose prize is confiscated and put back, which quietly makes the point that the labour was never about the apples.

The garden's location kept moving west as Greek geography expanded — first Libya, then beyond the Atlas mountains, then past the Pillars of Heracles. It is less a place than a direction: always the last place before the world stops.