From Folly to Follies [antikvár]

11 gardens are built by children. Unfortunately, children eventually 1% grow up and become adults. They learn that everything they V thought was unique is in fact banal, and everything they thought eternal is transitory. They discover that all that they loved is frail and mortal.l^N^TROD UCTION^Later on, and more pleasantly, they will make another discovery: Although all life eventually ends, it continually renews itself More beautiful than the garden itself are the memories of itthe regrets, the dreams, and the ghosts of gardens that we see in our mind's eye when we sniff a bunch of flowers or close our eyes and think of gardens of the past.On his way to America, French author and statesman Chateaubriand called on the governor of Saint-Pierre, the French territory in the Atlantic:A fme, soft aroma of heliotrope was being given off by a little bed of flowering beanstalks; it was wafted to our nostrils not by a breeze from our homeland, but by a wild wind from the New World, which bore no relationship to the exiled plant and none of the voluptuous memories it normally aroused. This perfume had not been breathed by beauty, or purified in her breast, or left in the air as she passed by But the scent was charged with memories of daybreak, of human culture and the world outside; it had in it all the melancholy of regret, partings, and lost youth.And Proust, near the beginning oi A la recherche du tewps perdu :When this humble passerby contemplated it, this dreaming child fixed this little corner of nature in his mind, the garden could not have realized that bccause of him all its most fleeting, ephemeral details would live on and not be forgotten. And yet the hawthorn perfume that gathers honey along the hedge where the wild roses will soon take its place, the sound of muffled, unechoing footsteps on a gravel path, a bubble forming against a water plant by the water in the river and bursting straight away: all these details, because they gave me such exaltation when I saw them, have survived despite the passing of time, even though the paths themselves are no more and the people who once crowded them are long since dead.These two passages are disturbingly alike, like a voice and its echo, or an object and its reflection in the water.Gardens are memories. Their history is rooted in ancient Greece and Rome, influenced to a greater or lesser extent by the Egyptians, the Persians, the Turks, and the Chinese. In Europe, the history of the garden begins and ends with the Italians. But the French in many ways played the most important part in this history. Although the idea of the garden as a gradual progress tov^ard initiation developed in Renaissance Italy, with the final epiphany in the depths of a woods, and the English who dreamed up the studied unkemptness of the "Anglo-Chinese" garden, the French achievement lay in the refusal ever to lose sight of the fact that man is a part of nature.The next word belongs to Charles Perrault, the great French writer of fairy talesand what is a garden if not a fairy tale?who told an anecdote that encapsulates the French attitude to the garden as a place for the delectation of man:When the Tuileries had been replanted and brought to the state in which you see them now, Monsieur Colbert [Louis XIV's Chief Minister] said to me, "Let us go to the Tuileries." He condemned the open gates of the garden: "This garden should be kept for the king alone. The people should not be allowed to ruin it, for give them a little time and they will destroy it totally." His opinion seemed to me to be very hard on the people of Paris. As we walked along the broad avenue, I said to him, "Sir, you would not believe the respect everyone has for these gardens, right down to the humblest of artisans. The women and children not only studiously avoid picking flowers, but will not even touch them. They walk through the gardens like reasonable people; the gardeners will bear witness to this fact. It would be a major affliction for the public not to be able to come and walk in these gardens.""The only people who come here are idle good-for-nothings," he said to me. "People come here," I replied, "to recover from their illnesses and take the air. They come here to talk of business, marriage, and anything that is better talked