Walking past 13th century cathedrals to the gates of Le Potager du Roi, the King's Kitchen Garden in Versailles. My mind whirring with the visual evidence of a culture that has chosen to value history, food, and landscape. In a place that has had centuries to advance, evolve, and learn how to savor the important aspects of life. Listed by the French Ministry of Culture as one of the Remarkable Gardens of France, Le Potager du Roi embodies history and culture as well as beauty and comestible utility.
Inside Le Potager du Roi I met with an American man who decided to francophile his life twenty years ago by moving to France. A graduate of Cornell, he is now the director of this garden, and helps to create a student network between American landscape architecture students and those studying in Versailles at the Ecole Nationale Supérieur du Paysage, or the high state school in France for the training of landscape architects. Their studio is a stones throw away from Le Potager, and all four years of classes are awarded their own plot to tend inside the garden.
I met with a fourth-year student who will be interning at the Chicago Botanic Garden, where I myself was interning last year. It was exciting to discuss with him the revolution we both wanted to be a part of, the effort to redesign the built world. There is nothing quite like starting one's career and discovering that the vision you have is shared by someone in your own shoes, halfway around the world. It is a feeling of comradery that transcends global boundaries or nationalities, that upholds the intention of revolutionizing the way we live by first redesigning the spaces we inhabit.
Le Potager du Roi began as an effort to supply the table of King Louis XIV, who ordered his gardener Jean Baptiste de la Quintinie to construct a vast edible space on the edge of what would later become the Saint Louis district. The careful and well-planned arrangement of garden plots allowed Quintinie to create various micro-climates capable of growing fruits and vegetables outside of their typical season. During this time the kitchen garden was an enormous enterprise manned by 30 gardeners and countless varieties, including over 12,000 fruiting trees.
The varieties of vegetables were a topic of great discussion, as Madame de Sévigné remarked when she wrote, "the craze for peas continues; the impatience waiting to eat them, to have eaten them, and the pleasure of eating them our the three subjects our princes have been discussing for the past four days now." In today's world it is difficult to imagine a time when vegetables carried an interest as powerful as today's fascination with celebrities or professional athletes. An interest, I hope, that will re-surface as our culture begins to place a higher value on edible landscapes - the places that bring us life.
Today the garden produces over fifty tons of fruits and thirty tons of vegetables each year, sold in several farmers markets around Versailles as well as at the school. In addition to teaching modern tenets of landscape architecture, the school works hard to re-introduce historic varieties into the garden, while teaching the importance of historic land preservation and restoration.
It was such an honor and a pleasure to be able to work in this garden. As a gardener and student of landscape, being invited into Le Potager du Roi stirs such strong feelings that I cannot adequately express them with words. I was literally squealing with delight as I walked through the garden, admiring the union of ancient design and modern application. It was an incredibly inspiring place, indeed fit for a King!
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