Where children's stories grow, at the edge of a clearing or behind a bramble hedge, a garden may appear. An enclosed, ordered, sometimes rewilded space, it is the place where the marvellous takes root and flourishes. Between the disciplined topiaries of classical gardens and the thick forests that border tales of initiation, tamed nature is the theatre of a metamorphosis: that of the real world into a symbolic landscape, of the story into a fable, of the child into a subject. Thus the garden is far more than a setting: it is the matrix of the tale. And the tale, in turn, is a garden of symbols. Both invite us to inhabit the world differently, to cultivate its imaginary as much as its forms.
Echoing the theme of the International Garden Festival, the next Conversations sous l’arbre offer you two days of lively discussions on “Tales in the Garden” with exceptional guests.
GUESTS
- Aurélia Gaillard, Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne, honorary senior member of the Institut universitaire de France
- Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, writer
- Jean-Sébastien Steyer, palaeontologist, researcher at the CNRS and attached to the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris
- Samuel Tasinaje, artist
