The Vowels Tree.

Monday garden- Part 5.

Image: A. C.

I’m currently reading The room of lost things by Stella Duffy and there is this passage about London parks: London is full of parks. Flower-free Green Park, Regent’s Park with mosque and roses, Hyde Park for horses and football games and lost cars trying to find the best way west, Kensington Gardens caught between Peter Pan’s magic and Diana’s Folly…Londoners rarely visit these charming parks. They are central and therefore too far from home for most. They are too nice.

This made me wonder about bigger Parisian gardens- who goes there? So far I’ve taken you to visit smaller and lesser known gardens as well as the ones situated at the periphery of usual touristic circuits. But last Monday I’ve decided to stop by Tuileries- the oldest and the most important of the French style gardens in Paris. It was once a part of the Château des Tuileries, the latter now destroyed. This garden, precisely because it is so big, holds some unusual spots.

My first observation was that two clearly distinct populations co-exist in these- better known- gardens: the tourists and the Parisians. For the latter the gardens are a place to sit and to be still for a while. I’ve noticed very busy looking women in tailored suits, suddenly stopping their brisk walk across the Tuileries’ sandy path to perch themselves on one of the green chairs and look at the flowers. Is it an example of the French life-style? Maybe- maybe it’s even more than that.

There is a particular taste for the Japanese culture in France, more so than in other European countries. The examples of this (mutual) infatuation are numerous- one only has to look at the influence of Japanese art on the Impressionists. While reflecting on it, I arrived at the notion of  hikikomogomo (悲喜交々)- that I discovered in an article by Beth Kempton.  It  means having alternating feelings of joy and sorrow in your heart, tasting the bittersweetness of life. It seems to me that a similar feeling permeates the culture here in France. There is the  “joie de vivre” of course but it is combined with an awareness of the brevity and fragility of life. In French there is the expression of doux-amer to describe a feeling which literally means bittersweet. That is not to say that Parisians don’t rush, step over each other in the subway or don’t have their eyes glued to their phones – but there is still this capacity to appreciate the brevity of the moment.

In the Tuileries there is a constant rush of tourists from the Louvre to the Place de la Concorde and its Egyptian obelisk. About half way the central path is there is interrupted by a calm circular mirror of water, surrounded by statues where one can sit and watch the sun go down in the distance, behind the Eiffel Tower. Sometimes the wind makes light ripples on the surface and the seagulls fly over the garden paths. This is where the Parisians will settle, put their feet on the round stone border of the water basin and breathe. It’s this suspended time again. Come, sit with me, for a while.

I came to Tuileries at dusk of an unseasonally warm fall day- the air hazy and mother-of-pearl coloured. After looking at the beautiful flower borders for a while I veered of the central path to a much less known corner of the garden. Here a huge oak tree seems to have been uprooted by a storm stretching its five long branches horizontally to the ground. It’s in fact a bronze sculpture, a moulding of a tree that was cut down in the north of the Italian peninsula. The artist- Giuseppe Penone- has revealed that parts of the fallen oak were used for the fire that melted the bronze for the sculpture. Thus making the parts of the real life tree enter the artwork forever.

At the end of each of the five branches a young tree was planted: a yew, an ash, an alder, a poplar and an oak. Each of them is dedicated to a divinity and carries its own symbolism. Yew is a tree of immortality, whilst ash is known as YggdrasilI, the World tree in Viking and Norse mythology. An alder represented protection and strength to the Celts, whilst in the ancient Greek mythology a poplar is said to grow at the entrance to the Realm of the Dead. Not only tied to death, the poplar is also connected to many stories of metamorphosis and freshwater. As for the oak it was known to be a tree of wise council and was used by Druids to predict the future. I didn’t know any of that as I sat down to look at the sculpture. Yet it felt like there were light silver threads connecting these trees to the past, weaving themselves between them and stretching towards the future. This small part of a busy garden was a protected space.

I sat there for a while – a tiny snail on a silvery bark of a tree nearby keeping me company. In the distance the rusty ochre of autumn trees and pale pinks and crimson of asters and dahlias were gently fading into the darkness.

There is another corner of the Tuileries, right next to the Musée de l’Orangerie where Monet’s Nympheas float forever in the dark waters of the pond. If you sit on a bench and look over to Concorde when the sun has gone down, Paris will offer you all of its shimmering beauty and bats- their danse. A moment douce-amère of the beauty of life. Don’t miss it.

D.J.