Garden Entertaining [antikvár]

I '1 i' I' i i-'l' ' '' IMTRCDUCTIOA garden makes a delightful dining room. Divinely decorated, tirelessly making itself over, only a garden can surprise its guests with such marvels as the newly burst bulb or the exquisite hummingbird. Never did lovingly prepared food and drink enjoy a more felicitous setting. A party set uplock, stock and Baccarat-out of doors where things are green and growing, is immediately enlivened and set free. Guests who would otherwise be sitting still are strolling, relaxed and enchanted. With our gardens we are creatures of the season, the mood, and the moment, and we like each other's company.The days of the staid garden party are long gone. As the partygivers and goers interviewed on the following pages attest, garden entertaining, with its bugs and sudden cloudbursts, demands more thoughtful planning. But it also promises greater ease while the party is in progress. This is the opportunity to bend the rules, intentionally mismatch the china, and perhaps playfully improvise an amusing centerpiece out of something wonderful that blossomed while you were in the kitchen. When the air is breezy, so is the party.Nothing comes to us as naturally as gathering in our gardens. There is proof of this through history, from Eden to Versailles and Winterthur. Images of the garden as paradise adorned Egyptian tomb paintings, Assyrian bas reliefs, Chinese scrolls, and illuminated manuscripts. The ancient Greeks constructed cool stone garden grottoes, watered by springs, in which to recline in hot weather and cultivated roof gardens in their cities. Roman villa gardens, too, were sybaritic, fanciful retreats, adorned with marble benches and dining tables as well as waterways in which wine jugswere suspended to cool and food floated to guests in dishes shaped like boats or birds.In Renaissance times, hidden jets sprayed surprised guests in lively gardens. Further on down the path the same guests were serenaded by musical water fountains. A century before the West was to discover coffee, seventeenth-century Turkish garden party-goers held coffee klatches on ornate carpets while slaves sang and played. Chinese hosts challenged their guests to compose a poem before a cup of wine floated to the end of a winding channel. The guest who failed had to drink the entire cup of wine on the spot. A painting of a Sultan's garden party depicts living fruit trees, cypresses and tulips, as well as cages containing singing birdsand that is just what was on the cake.The word "paradise" comes down to us from the Old Persian for "walled garden," and it is just that feeling of escape into another, better world that we seek to share with our friends. The seventeenth-century Japanese teahouse designers taught us the healing power of gardens by designing theirs specifically to aid visitors in shedding the cares of the world. Consciously or not, that is exactly what we try to do today when we entertain. A garden refuge, we have found, is a friend indeed. Perhaps that is what garden entertaining really is; the introduction of one dear friend to another.Here, have a seat in the shade near the jasmine. Enjoy this cool drink while you listen for the whippoorwill. Relax and know you are in the best of all possible worlds."I envy you," wrote the Chinese poet Ch'ien Ch'i. "I envy you, drunk with flowers, butterflies swirling in your dreams."