A Reader on Reading

The garden is then our business, the stage of our essential occupations, nature transformed into the setting in which we are to accomplish our allotted human tasks. The wise Turkish dervish whom Candide consults at the end of his adventures knows or cares nothing of what goes on in the world (for in stance, that two viziers and a mufti have been strangled in Constantinople), nor is he concerned with metaphysical questions about the reason for our existence or problems of good and evil. “What then are we to do?” asks Pangloss anxiously. “Shut up,” answers the dervish. Shut up and act. “Man is born for action, like fire tends to rise and stones to fall. Not to be occupied and not to exist is all one to man,” argues Voltaire against Pascal. And farther on: “Let us be consoled for not knowing the relationship that might exist between a spider and the rings of Saturn, and let us continue to examine that which lies within our reach.”

To examine nature, we must therefore render it accessible, lend it a shape and a symmetry that can be grasped by our senses. Faced with the conceptual order of a garden, we can pretend or assume to read it: allot significance to its beds and partitions, garner instruction from its layout, deduce a narrative from its sequence of plantings.

In this sense, every garden is a palimpsest, design over design, season after season. Let us consider, as an example, the garden through which Voltaire wandered during his three years of grace in Prussia: the royal park of Sanssouci. Sanssouci began life in 1715 as a kitchen garden planted on a hill outside Potsdam under the orders of Friedrich Wilhelm I, and it was sarcastically known as the Marlygarten in reference to Louis XIV’s costly garden at Marly. In 1744, Friedrich’s son Friedrich II added on a vineyard and six parabolic curving terraces for plum and fig trees and vines, each terrace divided by twenty-eight glazed windows and sixteen yew trees trimmed in the shape of pyramids. A year later, the terraces were extended southward by a level space of eight flowerbeds and punctuated by a fountain over which rose a gilded statue of the goddess Thetis and her attendants. Two sphinxes by Franz Georg Ebenhech were added a decade afterwards on the far side of the moat, leading to a plot of agricultural land, and still later a marble parapet topped with a dozen sculptures of children was erected to separate a Dutch garden of terraced beds from a rond-point and its fountain. Beyond this area, the king installed a Neptune Grotto and an Obelisk Portal, each with a small flower parterre, while to the west he erected a Chinese teahouse, a delightful folly designed by Johann Gottfried Buring between 1754 and 1757.

Flowerbeds, allées, parterres, fountains, sculptural groups, hedged paths combine to form a complex landscaped narrative: but in the beginning, the garden of Sanssouci had no other purpose than to express a certain simplicity as a place both pleasing and useful, a garden like the one through which God walked (Genesis tells us) “in the cool of the evening,” so peaceful, that it was here where Friedrich II stipulated (in several wills) that he wished to be buried. The model of such a garden is very ancient: in the oldest Mesopotamian texts no distinction is drawn between “orchard” and “garden,” since the aesthetic function was not necessarily differentiated from the utilitarian one.

At Sanssouci, however, habitation succeeded cultivation. A year after the establishment of the orchard and because of the beauty of the scenery, the king had a summer palace built on the site to take advantage of the delightful view. What was to have been merely a model of Eden was overwritten with new architectural episodes and their attendant subplots, complicating and multiplying the itineraries and vistas. In the following years, more buildings were added (such as the gardeners’ houses and the orangery, later transformed into guest lodgings), and to the north of the Schloss Sanssouci mock ruins were erected following the principle of baroque metaphors in order to hide the water tank that fed the park’s fountains. The stone metaphors hid too well their core meaning: only once did the king enjoy the displays of dancing water since the cumbersome mechanics that worked the jets did not become fully operational until the next century, when a steam engine was installed to fuel them. But by then the king was dead and his intricately conceived garden was no longer in fashion. Three kings later, Friedrich Wilhelm IV redesigned Sanssouci in the style of the Italian landscaped park we see today. The older scripts, however, can still be glimpsed beneath the more recent plots, groves, and pathways. As in a palimpsest, the original text never quite disappears.