I heard myself saying that one day and it stopped me cold. Born and raised to a barely middle class family in rural Michigan, I grew up thinking that one trip to Europe in my lifetime would be a lucky event, involving huge expense and sacrifices beyond my grasp. In this lifetime, anyway. The complete story of how I got to the day where I could offer travel advice with authority is too long for this post. But it was culture, not gardens that I wanted to understand in my first visits to France. Visits to public gardens were the means, not the end. That didn’t last long. There are people in the world who value the contributions of long dead gardeners so much that they preserve their work through history. Lots and lots of them at great expense and, no doubt, the occasional sacrifice, maybe even sacrifice beyond my grasp. Who knew?
So, of course, I did learn about the culture, and history became more than dates and times that I had to memorize to pass a test in school, and then those became the means to help me more deeply appreciate the hundreds of public gardens that preserve culture and history in color and transformed light.
When I started this blog in winter, I promised myself that I’d spend the dark days of January and February sharing some of these treasures, both in Europe and in the US, with you.
More soon…
