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…
Excellent! I look forward to reading more!
I’m visiting Paris in June so I’m looking forward to hearing about your adventures:-)
Mary, If you like roses, you’ll have your pick of some great rose gardens in peak form in June. L’Hay les Roses, Bagatelle…
Esther, very nice posts on gardens of Paris and France. I wonder what you think about the gardens in the cemeteries that abound in Paris and in France. Are they up to the standard that the gardens of other places such as the parks, palaces and chateaux? Do the plantings of the historic cemeteries of Montparnasse and Pere-Lachaise come up to par with the other kinds of places? I study World War I history and have visited the WWI battlefields and cemeteries there, and find them austere. Perhaps that is the way it should be, but I thought France might have given some of these places a little more floral flourish than they have, to date, although I did find the American War cemetery in Normandy very beautiful. What should be the horticultural philosophy towards such places? I wonder sometimes.
See these sites for reference
http://www.pariscemeteries.com/
http://battlefields1418.50megs.com/somme_cemeteries.htm
http://www.abmc.gov/cemeteries/cemeteries/no.php
I did visit Monparnasse in Paris and it seemed mostly stone and sculpture. Maybe some nice trees but even those were around the edges, if I remember correctly. I probably saw more of the small town cemeteries that you come across when driving and the ones that I remember follow the same pattern. Impressive statuary but more stone than plantings, even gravel between the graves. Usually surrounded by more stone in the form of walls.
I’ve read that Mount Auburn Cemetery here in Boston was the first of it’s kind, where landscaped, park-like surroundings encouraged visits. Maybe that was an American phenomena. The founding date for Mount Auburn is 1831 aand Montparnasse 1824 so they were started in the same generation.
Historically, the French landowners were often buried in their private chapels? Maybe the concept in France was to give people their own small versions of a chapel.