France Bicycle / Velo Tours

Cosmology and values – indeed about the whole order of things as the medieval mind saw it.language and symbolic power bourdieu When you visit the Garden of Versailles you are looking right at something which Louis XIV looked at when he visited it.vitamins, minerals, herbs for treating manic depression In other words, a garden can be a metaphor, used to convey a world view, a mood, a thought or an ideal. An entire book or several could be written about the garden as a literary or artistic metaphor. We will surely discuss this aspect as well. For the most part, we will deal with real gardens.

What makes gardens such potentially powerful metaphors is the way in which they bring together nature and art. This grouping permits a wide emphatic range, depending on the way one looks at nature in a given society. Gardens are by definition a human creation and not part of nature, so a culture that lives in a purely natural environment cannot understand what a garden is. For some cultures, such as those of ancient China and Japan, a garden is a refinement of nature. Today’s urban resident tends to view a garden as a space in which natural beauty, once lost, may be reclaimed.

To someone living in a dry desert, a garden represents on thing; to someone from a wet, green area, something else entirely. The themes of a particular type of garden can be largely dependent on culture such as woods being considered sacred in Northern Europe while having a more ominous connotation in the south. But there are also things in a garden that share a similar meaning no matter what part of the world they are found. The life-giving waters of a fountain is one example. There are people who would say that these share symbols belong to the set of images shared by all people, which can be access via the “collective unconscious,” as the psychologist C.Some would view these shared symbols as the collection of symbols inherited by all humankind and available through the ‘collective unconscious’, as the psychologist C.G. Some people, such as the great psychologist C.G. Jung, believed that these shared symbols are stored images inherited and accessed by all humankind.G. Jung believed. Ultimately of course anything in a garden can take on the character of a ‘symbol’ if the observer chooses to see it that way: a bee gathering nectar from a flower, the dance of sunlight filtered through foliage, the pattern of freshly fallen autumn leaves on the ground, a spider’s web hung with dew – and an infinite number of other things. “Reading” a garden isn’t easy, and a garden can’t be treated as though it were just words on a page with only one meaning.

A garden, like a good poem, contains many levels of meaning and draws a different response from every individual. There are, however, enough shared images and symbols either within or across cultures to make possible the existence of a language of gardens – or rather many languages, in fact an almost infinite amount.