Alternating discursive accounts with fictional vignettes that recreate time and place, this book skillfully integrates the history of French gardens with the modern history of ideas. ""Reading the French Garden" focuses on ideas that are essential to garden history: how gardens were perceived rather than simply laid out, how gardens of the past may be viewed differently by contemporaries and by later historians, the cultural determination of garden style--its social and intellectual uses."--John Dixon Hunt "The authors skillfully blend history and philosophy, sciences and novelistic invention into an intoxicating mixture. The result is completely successful: One can smell the rich fields of medieval Europe, view the preoccupied flight of bees long dead, and muse over the creation of that most artificial of natural worlds, the garden."-- Leighton W. Klein, "The Bloomsbury Review" " & quot; Reading the French Garden focuses on ideas that are essential to garden history: how gardens were perceived rather than simply laid out, how gardens of the past may be viewed differently by contemporaries and by later historians, the cultural determination of garden style -- its social and intellectual uses.& quot; -- John Dixon Hunt & quot; The authors skillfully blend history and philosophy, sciences and novelistic invention into an intoxicating mixture. The result is completely successful: One can smell the rich fields of medieval Europe, view the preoccupied flight of bees long dead, and muse over the creation of that most artificial of natural worlds, the garden.& quot; -- Leighton W. Klein, The Bloomsbury Review " "Reading the French Garden" focuses on ideas that are essential to garden history: how gardens were perceived rather than simply laid out, how gardens of the past may be viewed differently by contemporaries and by later historians, the cultural determination of garden style -- its social and intellectual uses." -- John Dixon Hunt " The authors skillfully blend history and philosophy, sciences and novelistic invention into an intoxicating mixture. The result is completely successful: One can smell the rich fields of medieval Europe, view the preoccupied flight of bees long dead, and muse over the creation of that most artificial of natural worlds, the garden." -- Leighton W. Klein, The Bloomsbury Review -- Leighton W. Klein, The Bloomsbury Review Alternating discursive accounts, or allees, with fictional vignettes that recreate time and place, the Le Dantecs integrate the history of French gardens with the modern history of ideas. Denise Le Dantec is a poet and Professor of Philosophy at the Centre National d'Enseignement A Distance, Paris. Jean-Pierre Le Dantec is a Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Paris-La-Villette. Jessica Levine is a writer and translator living in New York City. She has previously translated two works by Manfredo Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, 1944-1985 and Venice and the Renaissance.