Where are the most delicious enchantments ? In a garden, most certainly. Trembling with leaves, quivering with birds, where fairies hide in the sweet shadow of the trees, its music like the air we breathe, a garden where happiness is constantly reinvented, over seasons and blossomings, between baroque yew and classical hornbeam, murmuring water and soaring notes on a summer night, the memory of stone and the tangle of branches, the promise of fruit and the fragility of roses in the heat.
A hortus musicus whose magician, William Christie, is an artist-aesthete-gardener all in one. What a musician ! And what a gardener ! It is at Thiré in the Vendée, between bocage and plain, in a peaceful stretch of countryside whose paths and woodland call forth their ancient mystery, where the charm of long-lost provinces can still be felt, that year after year a garden like no other patiently grew, bloomed, and matured around an abandoned 16th-century manor.
A garden designed by the free flow of inspiration, like an enchanted musical score blessed with the most exquisite harmony and extreme refinement, this patch of paradise found, secret microcosm where the entire world is welcome, theater of an intimate imaginary, concentrates dreams and memories in profusion, the voices of today and the echoes of yesteryear crying out and conversing among the fragments of former times and faraway realms.
In this sun-kissed Gesamtkunstwerk, paths, lawns, and groves form the stage for an ever-recommencing celebration where heart, mind, and senses are dazzled and delighted, surprised and seduced, moved and enchanted beyond the effable. Who could imagine a more delicious lesson in beauty than this unique park ? Or a better demonstration of the paradigm of enchantment ?