Versailles' Gardens Poem by gershon hepner

Taming and humiliating
nature, Versailles’ gardens represent
a challenge for a maid-in-waiting
who paid them the enormous compliment
of leaving some unmastered as
her spirit, although Classical restraint
cannot be corrected by the beat of jazz,
which made the Austrian Queen seem merely quaint.

Inspired by an article written by Edward Rothstein concerning the changes in the New York Botanical Garden “The Forest Premeditated: Illusions of Wildness in a Botanical Garden, ” NYT, June 16,2008) :
The garden has the fourth-largest herbarium in the world, a collection of 7.3 million dried and catalogued plants. There are branches dating from the late 18th century, cut by venturesome botanists sailing with Capt. James Cook and samples found by John C. Frémont’s expedition in the Oregon Territory and California in 1842-45. These plant fragments, decorously mounted on flat sheets, are stored in fireproof cabinets in a specially constructed storage space. They are gradually being digitally scanned and made available online (sciweb.nybg.org/Science2/vii2.asp) . The herbarium is the garden’s antipode: natural habitats replaced by filtered air, living branches by dried twigs, bright colors by faded leaves and printed DNA analyses. But each part feeds the other. Maybe there is something of the cloister in this after all, for the devotion to plant life here is palpable. It isn’t just the parkland, which despite its beauty has its limitations. There are graduate education programs, a school of professional horticulture, children’s education programs, a rare-book library with more than a million items, a new plant research laboratory. Plans include not just continued modernization of the library but work on the original 50-acre forest: invasive species have intruded and nature now requires both restoration and restitution. There is something moving about the entire enterprise. In a remarkable new book, “Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, ” Robert Pogue Harrison (who wrote similar meditations on cemeteries and on forests) elicits some of the meanings that have accumulated around the idea of a garden, from myths, in which the chosen few “can possess the gift of their bodies without paying the price for the body’s passions, ” to places like Versailles, which reflect “an aesthetic drive to tame, and even humiliate, nature into submission.” In those royal gardens Mr. Harrison also finds the urge to encompass and incorporate and comprehend: “the militant humanism of the age.” Our age’s humanism is much more modest. We are self-effacing to a fault. We don’t seem to be taming nature, but to be permitting its full range of expression. We allow it to express multiple perspectives. We don’t permit any habitat to dominate, and we defer to the demands of each. We seem to submit to nature. Of course we are creating images of ourselves. At times, though, the garden can make us feel a little like Darwin, looking through his window at the variety and density of life, seeking fundamental principles. And out of the careful observation of differentiation and interaction, out of the pleasures taken in park and forest, the garden works that timeless ancient magic: we begin to see things whole.

6/16/08