Le jardin : un petit monde, un monde parfait. Pour une poétique du jardinage by Marco MARTELLA – Château de Bénouville

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Le jardin : un petit monde, un monde parfait. Pour une poétique du jardinage by Marco MARTELLA – Château de Bénouville

The garden: a little world, a perfect world. For the poetics of gardening

What spurs us to create and to tend to gardens? What links are forged between the gardener and these areas that can be enclosed or exposed across the territory around him? The garden often offers us the possibility to take a sidestep, to try out different ways to be, to act, within the world, far from any political model or dominating existential consideration. Writer-gardeners, from Chateaubriand to Vita Sackville-West or Hermann Hesse, have all endeavoured to answer this question. Just like any other gardener, they strove to personify, within their verdant enclosures, an ideal living environment within which man would no longer be separated from nature and the cosmos. Their experience offers us a vision of the garden, as a ‘small world, a perfect world’ capable of withstanding history, and a source of wisdom.

Marco Martella

Marco Martella is editor of the Jardins magazine (lespommessauvages.fr). He is the ‘translator-author’ of an essay on garden art entitled Le jardin perdu (by Jorn de Précy, Actes Sud, 2011) and of the narrative work Jardins en temps de guerre (by Teodor Cerić, Actes Sud, 2014). Both works have already been published in Italian and Spanish. In 2018, he also published Un petit monde, un monde parfait (by Editions Poesis).