France: Walk in urban gardens, with Raphaèle Bernard-Bacot
Book: All these gardeners obviously had a hard time with confinement. In spring, the garden asks that we take care of it if we want to harvest its vegetables in summer.
By Bhavi Mandalia
Pledge Times
Sept 29
Excerpt:
For Raphaèle Bernard-Bacot, garden rhymes with drawing. After designing the King’s vegetable garden in Versailles, she explored family or shared gardens, private gardens flush with buildings or perched on the roofs.
This urban tramp, pencil in hand, gave birth to a book, City gardeners (Rue de l’Échiquier editions). Raphaèle paints there, in drawings and in well-chosen words, 54 portraits of women and men for whom life is not imaginable without a garden, even tiny or wedged between two avenues.
For them, happiness is really at the end of the street … and the hoe, says Raphaèle Bernard-Bacot: “The garden is good for their purses. He avoids a few visits to the supermarket where the vegetables, moreover, are much worse. Then, seeing your plants grow, it’s just magic! It makes you happy!
The garden is also an important factor of social bond. Shared gardens allow us to be and create together, to make friends. In town, we all suffer a little loneliness … Finally, the garden is the pleasure of being in the open air, of forgetting a little the stress of our lives and of momentarily abandoning our computer, our existence of more and more connected. “
