The theme of Parks and Gardens, elected by the Council of Cultural Co-operation in 1992, was chosen together with that of monastic influence to conclude a methodological study. In particular it made it possible to experiment with teaching actions and to find co-operation with Eastern Europe.

Taking into account its multidisciplinary character - a garden is indeed essentially a meeting place of scientific, technical and artistic cultures - and its opening towards cultural landscape, it constitutes one of the privileged fields of application of the European Landscape Convention.

definition of the fields of work

The methodological exercise began with a meeting of experts held in Palazina di Caccia di Stupinigi, close to Turin, at the end of 1992. The experts present, botanists, architects, historians, garden conservation specialists, agronomists, creators, teachers, knew how to highlight all the theoretical and practical implications of this topic, so much so that ten years afterwards all the actions undertaken are still founded on this first multidisciplinary confrontation.

A garden is by nature a site whose responsibility is transmitted during ages, but also a site in which the work carried out in the present will find part of its results only several dozens, even several hundreds years later. It thus ensures a bond, continuity and even co-operation between generations.

A garden is always anchored in a territory, but it is at the same time a place of mixture, a grafting and hybridisation of both erudite cultures and horticultural practices. A garden, only through the variety of the origins of the plants in it, constitutes an opening to the world. In our multicultural societies, it enables everyone to find elements of his/her own culture and to understand, intellectually and practically, how the cultures interfere and combine.

Because a garden presents plants and animals and puts them on display, it constitutes - obviously - a "mise-en-scène" of nature. But the terms of this presentation evolved much during the ages. One can even say that the largest process played during the history of the gardens is that of "domestication", which man dared to exert on nature, through which he handled and proportioned the natural, accepted the life of plants, introduced artifice and the artificial: English landscape gardens, without borders and fences, automata and machinery parks, the waterworks of the Renaissance, the Baroque and the Classical eras, the natural gardens of William Robinson, the moving gardens of Gilles Clément... What better subject for the new experts of the information society than to face a domain in which a part already familiar to them has been played for a long time: the conflict of reality and virtuality?

If the majority of meaningful data that underlie the structure of religious buildings and of their picturesque or carved representations became "illegible" for the majority of our contemporaries, owing to the obliteration of religious practices or of the knowledge about the role of monks in society, the gardens are themselves prone to two kinds of obliteration: the loss of botanical knowledge and the loss of symbolic knowledge. A historical garden is always founded on an architectural program, itself based on a method and an initiation. It is properly speaking a metaphor. Its drawing, its perspective, its masses, its statues, the movement of water, the "factories" built there and, of course, the plants found there "tell" a history: legend, reflection of the power of its owner, love of philosophy or geometry... There exist a social reading, a reading of voyage and wandering, a cultural reading of the garden.

Can one move the vocabulary of the garden, usually associated with constrained and closed spaces, towards an apparently immense and open space?" Consequently, what best subject than the garden to try to understand the relation of the local to the global?

By the diversity of the practices engaged, parks and gardens can also enable a confrontation of knowledge. The crafts involved in the maintenance of a garden are multiple and demand constant updating. The disappearance of knowledge constitutes a true challenge, which has to be stood, especially if one thinks that a reopened Europe makes it possible to answer today on the scale of a Large Europe.

Always on the scale of the found continent, through gardens and landscape one perceives a true stake of co-operation. Not only because there is factual solidarity in the management of natural spaces beyond borders, but also because most of the Europe of the gardens was left wasted for decades.

Before splitting up, the Europe of the gardens was one. The Europe of the gardens formed a true society within society, as well as a source of cultural exchanges. Collaboration and confrontation concerning the state of territorial and urban gardens, in the East as in the West, constitute current stakes for which teams set themselves up to carry out common actions once again exceeding the logic of borders.