The ancient city
« Aux côtés de la cour, on voit un grand jardin, avec ses quatre arpents enclos dans une enceinte… »
HOMERE, extraits de l’Odyssée, chant VII, vers 112
This garden was designed in the old vegetable garden. Its plan refers to that of an ancient city. In a square enclosure, four rivers evoking the garden of Cyrus oriented in the four directions west/east, north/south divide the world into four parts.
You enter this closed place through an opening in the surrounding wall. Theilexs with their fastigiated port recall the columns of a porticoed street. The first central part, to the northeast, evokes an odeon. On its stands were planted iris whose colors form a rainbow.
The second part, to the northwest, represents an allegorical garden divided into four small gardens by the four rivers of Paradise which irrigate the earth:
The garden of the simple ones
Symbolized by an apple tree, tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
THE AROMATIC GARDEN
Symbolized by a pomegranate tree, tree of life bearing the fruits of immortality.
The garden of marie
Symbolized by an ineradicable dwarf Lebanese cedar.
The vegetable garden
Symbolized by an almond tree, the tree of the renewal of nature. The third part, to the southwest, the tholos. The fourth, to the southeast, the agora.
Like a frieze that awakens a space dominated by the green of the grassy paths, a border of perennial flowers surrounds this garden.
