In 1999 the Institute published a book devoted to twelve gardens of Europe and to transversal readings, from water flows to labyrinths, from gardening tools to the traces of exoticism, from the Italian Renaissance to contemporary urban landscape parks.

The pages that we propose follow the same paths and suggest new ones. They thus tell the history of Europe by proposing a virtual route, which, as a labyrinth, has to be able to find its own path into the past, as well as into the relevance of the gardens.

rule of the game

It is indeed a tracking game that is initially proposed. The garden is a secret. It even stands out as one of the last great areas of secrecy. Of all cultural heritages, together with the religious ones, the parks and gardens certainly draw more on a vocabulary and a grammar pertaining to symbolic, mythological, sacred, and sometimes esoteric fields. The garden is biological. The garden is planetary. The garden can thus seem the most obvious symbol of contemporary globalisation. It is however always deeply marked by an individual, historical, artistic, social, even climatic identity.

Given this very richness and complexity, if one takes into account the totality of the history of gardens, it is necessary to call upon multiple approaches. However, to explain the gardens of Europe and to lead you into rediscovering their secrecies require a choice. As you will notice, this choice is guided not by fame only, but initially by meaning. With emblematic gardens such as Villa d'Este, Bomarzo, Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles, Stowe or Buttes-Chaumont we sought to make you discover gardens significant for the history of a family, a team, a person, which are engaged in an exemplary way in the re-establishing of bonds, the meeting of cultures, the "repair" of Europe. In other words, we wish to show you ignored patrimonies, creations that answer the interrogations of Europe, priority places for questioning crossed identities, steps that aim at preserving meaning, at transmitting it as a message of citizenship and a know-how for the future.

entry ways

Like the golden thread of the Gardens of the Imaginary in Terrasson, which guides visitors on a legend tour and which opens these pages, the gardens always propose routes of initiation. They are places of symbols and allegories, gods and goddesses, fauns and nymphs, dragons and sphinx that pose enigmas at every corner. The garden is a rebus conceived not simply as a succession of surprises, but on the contrary built stage by stage, in sets of superimposed accounts telling stories about knight-errants, pilgrims in quest of the sacred, from the Romance of the Rose to the Dream of Poliphilia.

Each page thus proposes a topic and a region of Europe. Each page also comprises the means "to know some more" about words or expressions highlighted in the field: articles on technical terms, characters, places, routes...