harbin

French gardening is a famous hooby since King Louis the XIV decided to have the largest and most extraordinary garden Europe had ever seen in his times and for decades to follow.  French gardening is an art, is a complete science involving the latest technologies of the time as it was deployed on the vast woods of Versailles. 
French use to consider their gardening as a way of giving an order to the landscapes and rivers where their king, sun, and center of the universe rules, allmighty, superior to any deity of the universe, known and to be discovered. (When little later Louisiane will be sold, French  will think they get rid of a small county full of mosquitoes and exiled bandits with their lovers of fortune, far away, far away from the center of the universe they unhabit.)
It is one reason, or maybe one result of the French mind, making French people different in a manner, that push them to  handle the world and the creation as an object to be fashioned.  It is a fact that Nature in France is never gigantic or a tremendous in its unleashed works. And as a result it has always given French people this arrogant  feeling that they were to  change the  natural conditions using their brains and muscles: Suez and Panama are somehow the kind of fruit generated by this french feeling.
Perspective, straight line,  planned , cut, organised like battallions, the gardens of Versailles, are to be the sign of the almighty king's power.
But far from their labyrinths, their bosquets, their articial lakes for small galleons to take the king and his conquests to the distant lands of thousand and one silky nights, French, nowadays retire in gardens that they consider as private islands far from the intrusive society with its technology.
Gardens are to be harbours where poets can, once again, escaped from pestilent parisian salons, use their tongue and let their heart express the totality of their hurt hearts while their friends play the string instruments or blow some envouting  melody. Shall they be arabian strings, african percussions,  chinese cello, japanese bamboo flutes, within the garden and far away from the snake, they share the simple joy of having friends by their sides. One has a white peony in hand, one offers the water of his old desert gourd, another offers some roses to the cita player. All of them smile and enjoy the present hour for tea before white alcohol flows  into they loving chests. And the stars, watered eyes of the sky, give them an esquisite glance, their protective blessing,  as their united songs fill the azurean sky.