THE MORNING LIST
Japanese gardens were immediately fashionable when they were discovered by Europeans visiting the Archipelago at the start of the Meiji era (1868-1912). Profoundly different from classical or English gardens, they are a reproduction of the world or of nature in miniature. Thus gardens of artificial hills, with their lake and their emblematic red bridge, dry temple gardens, with their decoration of rocks, moss and gravel, or tea gardens, with a codified route, have been reproduced in Europe. These gardens are particularly beautiful in early spring, when magnolias or cherry trees bloom spectacularly, and in autumn, when the foliage of Asian trees takes on flamboyant colors. “La Matinale” invites you to discover five of them, in France, between Toulouse and Boulogne-Billancourt.
The Pierre-Baudis garden, in Toulouse
Created in 1981, the Japanese garden of Toulouse, with an area of 7,000 m2, occupies part of the vast Compans-Caffarelli public garden. Designed by the Gardens and Green Spaces Department, it was named in honor of the former mayor of the Pink City, Pierre Baudis. It’s a stylish garden tsukiyamareproduction of nature in miniature, with artificial hills, a body of water and an island evoking paradise, which is completed, partly enclosed by walls, by a dry garden.
A tea pavilion, which looks like it came straight out of a print by Hokusai, is inspired by the famous palace of Katsura, erected in Kyoto in the 17th centurye century. The emblematic red bridge, the sacred color in Japan, is a link between the world of men and that of the gods. Other elements, minerals – skilfully arranged erect rocks, a sea of sand or a dry gravel river – compose with the vegetation – flowering cherry trees, maples, bamboos or cloud-shaped shrubs – a serene and inspiring landscape.
In the Compans-Caffarelli garden, boulevard Lascrosses, Toulouse. Free admission. Practical information on Toulouse-tourisme.com
The eastern park of Maulévrier, in Maine-et-Loire
The “largest Japanese garden in Europe” was created at the beginning of the 20the century by the architect Alexandre Marcel. A lover of Asian art, the creator of the set for the La Pagode cinema in Paris had transported casts of statues and a copy of a temple to the park of his property in Maulévrier (which then included the neighboring Château Colbert). Khmer of the Universal Exhibition of 1900. He built a fake pagoda there and installed an emblematic red bridge leading to the symbolic “islands of paradise”.
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