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Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the discovery of Pompeii attracted European aristocrats to include the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Southern Italy) on their Grand Tour itinerary. Similarly, Sybaris, an ancient Greek colonial polis also directed aristocratic attention to the region. French painter and engraver Jean-Claude Richard de Saint-Non and his entourage of architects most famously documented the ruinous Sybaris and exported its imagery back to France. In parallel with these developments, interest in recreating sybaritic images within luxurious Picturesque gardens arose. Drawing upon a pair of garden case studies, Monsieur de Monville's Broken Column House (1780–81) at Désert de Retz, Chambourcy, and Queen Marie-Antoinette's hameau (1783) within the Petit Trianon Gardens at Versailles, this paper examines the sybaritic images, their influences and the ethical values of the creators of these gardens. Monville and Marie-Antoinette were, for instance, charged of excess. This paper is concerned with the way in which these sybaritic places were configured and how they encapsulated a mythic Sybaris, and argues that the charges of excess levelled against their creators partly stemmed from the unusual and sybaritic effects to be found at their private entertainment gardens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

French picturesque gardens constructed during the last decades of the 18th century were a major vehicle to express the owners' artistic taste and world views, and offer a vantage point to observe the social, political and philosophical ideas of French Enlightenment. Current discussions on French picturesque gardens focus on their respect for nature and pursuit of "all times and places", yet not enough research has been conducted to examine the special representation of other in those gardens. This paper discusses the representation of other in both historical and geographical dimensions in a representative French picturesque garden Desert de Retz, and through architectural and hermeneutic reading of the garden, discussion on French art and aesthetic taste of the time, and examination of major works by representative philosophes, this paper exposes the different representation of the historical other and the geographical other in Enlightenment France, and argues that contrary to the fluid and dynamic image created for past stages in Western history, the image constructed for the Orient is completely divorced from its own context and history to become essentialist and static. The historical other is in fact still safely incorporated into the Enlightenment vision of a progressive development; only the Orient was the real other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using primary data collected at the national and local levels in France, this paper shows how water price increase, initially intended to generate environmental benefits through reducing water use, has produced economic incentives for households to drill their own garden boreholes. The paper first presents the results of a national survey which identifies the increasing number of garden boreholes as an issue of concern in a majority of the French counties. It then presents a microeconomic model which represents the households' decision to construct a borehole. The model is used to simulate the impact of various water pricing scenarios on tube well development and residential water demand at regional level. The paper ends with a discussion of the social impact of emerging independent supply strategies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Urbanization can promote the replacement of native species by exotic species resulting in an increase in community's similarity over time. This process is called biotic homogenization, which is usually studied at large scale from species lists. Our paper addresses the effects of urbanization on plant community at local scale in areas where urban policies are implemented. We focus on private gardens as they are the most common components of green spaces in European urbanized areas. They are also a place where exotic species are introduced. Observations were made on spontaneous flora sampled from gardens in two study sites of the French Mediterranean: a large city and a village located in an urbanizing rural area. We evaluated how urban landscape influences floristic similarity and how exotic species affect homogenization. We divided each study site in three built-up density zones. As the urbanization process of both sites did not take place at the same time, we were able to assess the effect of time on floristic similarity. Results indicate that floristic similarity is less important in high dense built-up areas than in low dense ones. Exotic species tend to reduce floristic similarity in city centers and increase floristic similarity in low dense built-up areas in both sites. Landscape metrics calculated in built-up areas surrounding the gardens influence floristic similarity. Lastly, we found that urban planning in terms of built-up density affects biodiversity distribution and that private gardens can provide landscape connectivity within urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book is written by Érik Orsenna, a member of the French Academy. The "portrait of a happy man" shows how André Le Nôtre (1613-1700) became the father of the French gardens. The paper presents some details on the first French gardens he conceived: the ones from the castle of Vaux le Vicomte, as well as his relation with Nicolas Fouquet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about the gardens designed by famous British sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay. The privately owned garden in the hill country of Provence, France is the largest and most important garden Ian Hamilton Finlay has worked on outside his home at Stonypath, southwest of Edinburgh, Scotland. As the garden is not open to the public, this essay sets out to be an initial survey of the garden and its works. The garden was begun in 1994 and has been developed with considerable and active proprietorial involvement, as well as the services of many craftsmen and women. In a manner common to Finlay, some artworks in the garden are re-visionings of pieces found elsewhere, or previously found only on paper; these recastings may require rigorous reformulations. It will be useful to consider, briefly, the nature of Finlay's garden-works. He once said his real achievement was to organize bits of landscape and things, make good compositions out of grass, trees, flowers and artefacts'. These artefacts act as a focal point for an area around them, small at Little Sparta but capable of considerable expansion.

The experience presented here relates to 2020, a particularly timely year for plant disease‐related communication (International Year of Plant Health, IYPH2020), but also a unique year because of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Our goal was to illustrate the diversity and beauty of fungal plant pathogens through a naturalist approach that could be followed by any amateur. We achieved this end through "phytopathological strolls", in which we observed and determined the origin of symptoms on diseased plants found in our garden, in the local streets, and in nearby open spaces, and shared this matter with a broad public. The lockdown imposed in France created an additional motivation to take up the challenge, and to involve our children, even under strong constraints such as movement restrictions. We observed and described fungal pathogens through hundreds of photographs, shared our findings with a large audience on Twitter, and received feedback. The material used was deliberately simple and transportable: a digital reflex camera, an old microscope, a mobile phone, some books, and an internet connection. Between 17 March 2020 and 20 June 2021 we found 196 plant pathogens, including 97 rusts, 27 powdery mildews, and 28 septoria‐like diseases. We discuss here the importance of promoting searches for plant pathogens, their description and conservation, through a combination of classical approaches and digital tools in tune with the times, such as Twitter, by treating pathogen identification like a detective game and, more surprisingly, by making use of the addictive nature of collection approaches, drawing a parallel with Pokémon GO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the design of the landscape garden Betz and its château in the Valois region of France. Topics include the involvement of Princesse de Monaco Marie Catherine de Brignole-Sale and her lover Louis Joseph de Bourbon-Condé in having the garden remade, the architecture of ruins in the garden, and the roles of designer Hubert Robert in redesigning the garden.

The article considers the royal gardens during the reign of King Louis XIV of France, by focusing on the commissioned prints by Israël Silvestre depicting the first fêtes of Louis' reign, the Grand Carousel of 1662 held on the grounds of the Louvre in Paris, France, and the pleasures of the enchanted isle 1664 held at on the grounds of Versailles. Topics include pageantry and state, iconography and symbolism, and books of the festivals produced by the Petite Académie established for that purpose.

The article discusses the Dragon Fountain in the gardens of Versailles, France during the 1660s, including the allegorical, or symbolical, nature of the fountain's design and the sculptures in the fountain's water. The relationship between the burlesque literary genre and the Dragon Fountain is discussed. The roles that poet and polemicist Charles Perrault, architect Claude Perrault and artist Charles Le Brun played in developing the Dragon Fountain are discussed.

The article presents the seventeenth-century French description of the grotto in the gardens of the palace of King Louis XIV of France's Versailles with its English translation. It was written by French court historian André Félibien who specialized in writing about topics of architecture and the arts and was published by Sébastien Mabre-Cramoisy of Paris, France. A brief overview of the history of the gardens of Versailles are presented.

The article looks at the history of aesthetics in landscape architecture and garden design in England and France. It states that English writer Joseph Addison was the father of aesthetics and first applied his ideas to gardening. It also looks at the influences on the aesthetic principles of gardening and landscape design including ancient cultures, Chinese architecture, and the Age of Enlightenment.

One of the rare surviving early nineteenth-century panoramas, John Vanderlyn’s 1818–19Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versaillesis a visual anomaly: panoramic in form, but not in experience. It was, famously, a financial failure. This may be because the subject-matter did not resonate with early nineteenth-century American audiences, for whom Versailles symbolized monarchic excess; or perhaps because of Vanderlyn’s lack of commitment to showmanship. He seemingly felt more comfortable in the role of artist, and perhaps looked to Versailles as a subject that might work as both art and spectacle. Seventeenth-century French gardens were designed as comprehensible units, to be seen and understood rather than felt and explored. Seen from one of the many vantage-points built into the garden, the landscape at Versailles coalesced into a symmetrical, harmonious vision. Effectively, this splits the circular painting into two ideal views – of the palace and of the garden – that are each complete in themselves. A viewer has little need to scan the painting’s surface. A panorama asks of viewers to engage with their bodies, to add motion and hence a form of narrative duration to the scene. This panorama of Versailles instead arrests a viewer’s eyes, denying the panoramic effect. Visitors to Vanderlyn’s panorama imagined emotional responses, but foundered on the painting’s self-sufficiency. Thus Vanderlyn’s compromise puts into relief the role of the subject in the panoramic experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarly work has shifted our attention to the ways in which gardens negotiated the particularities of their ecological situation. New studies look at the archaeology of gardens, a fundamentally architectural shift which excavates issues of resource use. Materially specific research which sets gardens back into their hydraulic and topographic context has illuminated new dimensions of their inventive praxis. Many gardens turn out, in fact, to have been very carefully constructed in relation to a sensitive reading of local hydrological conditions. What is more, the facts of these sources seem also to be integrally enmeshed with their spatial and poetic aspects, providing salutary examples as our attention returns to what we are now calling sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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Population differentiation of alien invasive plants within their non-native range has received increasingly more attention. Common gardens are typically used to assess the levels of genotypic differentiation among populations. However, in such experiments, environmental maternal effects can influence phenotypic variation among individuals if seed sources are collected from field populations under variable environmental regimes. In the present study, we investigated the causes of an altitudinal cline in an invasive plant. Seeds were collected from Senecio inaequidens (Asteraceae) populations along an altitudinal gradient in southern France. In addition, seeds from the same populations were generated by intra-population crossings in a climatic chamber. The two seed lots were grown in a common garden in Central Belgium to identify any evidence of environmentally induced maternal effects and/or an altitudinal cline in a suite of life-history traits. Results failed to detect any environmental maternal effects. However, an altitudinal cline in plant height and above-ground biomass was found to be independent of the maternal environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No Abstract available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looks at the similarities and differences in aesthetics between the French Gothic cathedral Chartres and Japanese Zen Buddhist rock and stone garden Ryoan-ji. Form and space in religious feeling and perception; Architectural styles and images of the spirit; Ability to appreciate the aesthetics of a culture different from one's own.