Writing with the Jardins des Floralies in Montreal: Towards an Expanded Garden History

摘要

This paper, based on a larger research project, explores the possibility that gardens and other designed landscapes can be considered historically active. Inspired in part by the gardens of Gilles Clement and Louis Le Roy, I argue that natural processes of growth and change play an important role in the kinds of historical change we might read in gardens. The apprehension of these processes together with the traces of human intervention that attempt to direct or respond to them provide access to a history of relations between human and non-human forces particularly relevant to a landscape history animated by broader environmental concerns. Focusing on a site within the Jardins des Floralies, in Montreal, I combine textual analyses, field experiences, and a creative writing process in order to attend to the agency of gardens in historical processes.