And the next section I'm going to read
is called "Other Gardens."
And as I said, Le Nôtre's best-known gardens were these
huge projects that he did in the Tuilleries, Versailles,
Vaux-le-Vicomte, parts of the Luxembourg, et cetera.
But he also did many, many other gardens, most of which
are in the Ile-de-France, the area of central France
of which Paris is the center.
All these gardens still exist, though many of them
have wandered largely from his plans.
So in this section, I'm playing with the history
of these spaces, as well as the gardening of them.
So it's kind of how history has sculpted them,
and then how the gardener sculpts them as well.
"Saint-Germain-en-Laye."
In 1122, Louis VI le Gros had a castle built on the Plateau de
Laye for the view and the wind.
And people are those little things way over there in red.
A gardener's job is to open space
and not to deal with mass, and only
rarely with color in a universe of green and sand.
A garden includes everything you can see from the garden.
So Saint-Germain-en-Laye stretches far beyond Paris.
When Le Nôtre replaced the gardens,
when the superintendent of water and fountains,
when François Francine complained that Le Nôtre showed
no respect for resources, enormous poplars and every
ancient exchange of molecules is gardening a representational
art.
And he who is consumed by want will fall asleep
counting to every one there is one impossible land.
The endless lawn appears as a straight line.
The pain of singular time as a tree must feel about space.