How to Take Charge of Your Flowering Containers

Give the Button Top pot a go this year.
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No need to go fancy a simple holly will suffice.  Perhaps a groundcover conifer, pruned into the Button Top.
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Why are Button Top pots rare?
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Not into the Button Top?  Rocket Top?  Square Top?  Square With a Button....  Play.
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This garden, below, a Garden Design course in a single photo.
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Flow, canopy, understory, groundcovers, walls, entry ways, color all year, low maintenance, insect/disease resistant, deer proof, drought proof, maximum pollinator habitat, contrasting textures, contrasting colors, focal points, seasonal focal points. 



Pic, above, here.
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Wish I could swoop this pair to my garden.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T

Why Have a Garden or Plants Inside

How to write about putting a Garden Design together?  Seriously, how?  After several attempts, writing for my first book's publisher, beyond horrid, I knew what to do.  Write about Garden Design in the same manner of every class I've ever taught in the Horticulture program at the local college, and Atlanta Botanical Garden.  Decades experience with those.
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In addition, this has never been mentioned outside my innermost tribe, choose what biblical scholars have chosen since the bible was written, obsess over a single word.  In a secular manner, of course. 
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At the front end I knew Garden Design, in your personal realm, held a huge gift to wield, selfishness.  That front end lasted almost 2 decades.  Epiphany arrived.  Selfishness, was the wrong word.  Correct word?  Grace.  Amusing.
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Personally, another word, for my own garden and gardening, presented, atonement.  Not religious, more literal, at-one-with.
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Studying historic landscapes across Europe for decades, many were estates with acreage.  Plenty of scope-for-the-imagination transposing their Garden Designs to subdivisions in USA.  Ironically, all, began as farms.
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Time passed, partaking historic world Garden Design for suburban USA, a layer, without awareness, learned.  Combining agriculture with ornamental horticulture.  This epiphany made me laugh out loud.  USA colleges, in their wisdom, separate the agriculture school from the ornamental horticulture school, Providence never has, never will.  Does this really matter?  Think, dead bees.  Won't go beyond this at the moment, quite its own rabbit hole, and we're already in a different rabbit hole.       


Pic, above, here.
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Scrolling thru pinterest yesterday, came across, above.  First thought, that's MY garden.  Designed, exact garden for myself decades ago, in the backyard of my 30 year home.  (Posted in earlier posts.)  Learned this style, Tara Turf Stone Terrace, while in Europe.  Fell, hard, pure putty.  This style Garden Design, above, not understood, in the macro, in USA.
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Southern Living magazine came to shoot that garden twice thru the years.  A day before they arrived, the second time, wasband, decided to help.  When I discovered his 'help' I let out a cry, nothing emerged but spit.  Tried again for voice, none, pure spit.  Knew to walk inside the house I was so mortified, not comprehending.  If he had tried to sabotage me, a life's work, he could not have chosen a better method. 
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My garden, same as above, was entirely pruned of its rustic backdrop hedge.  Gone, poof, over a decade of growing it to Garden Design perfection.  Guess what replaced that rustic backdrop hedge?  The side of my neighbor's home, mere feet away.  Spit?  Miracle I didn't stoke.  Wasband thought the RUSTIC HEDGE was garbage and I was lazy for letting it appear?  Part of a master plan I awaited years for. 
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There is patience, impatience, and, tarapatience which can go either way.
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Will move along, getting irritated just writing this terrible story.
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A few years ago, pinterest again, found this garden, below.  Stopped me flat.  Who did this?  Never, anywhere, country/continent, seen this Garden Design, below, excepting one place, my own garden.  I must meet this person, kindred spirit. 
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Vanity Fair shot this pic, it was within an article about Bunny Mellon, here.  Had never heard of her.  Looked up everything I could after seeing her garden.  Zero disappointment, instead, learning and epiphanies. 

 
Pic, above, here.
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Both gardens, above, have the same layer of Garden Design.  Crazy rare in USA.  Do you intuit this layer, know what it is?  Hint, it's the missing link between Agriculture and Ornamental Horticulture. 
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More, it's the original Sustainable.  Further, it's the original Organic.  In addition, it's the original Eco.  Have I missed any words of horticultural commerce since 1960, aka filthy lucre?
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Head's up, Providence has no ornamental horticulture.  It's all Agriculture.  Remember my choice to obsess over single words?  Notice the capital letters.  Sure, learned a lot across Europe in historic gardens for decades.  Epiphanies from that learning arrived across decades working in my own garden.  Working?  Never worked a day in my garden.  Pure washing-of-the-servants-feet.
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What is this layer of Garden Design, pics above?  Pollinator habitat. 
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Gardening this way requires zero irrigation, fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides.  Big Whoop, as one of my dearest WWII veterans liked to say.  Best Big Whoop ever, gardening this way increases agricultural crop yields by 80%.  Do the math.  Now do a bit of Johnny Cash, Meditate on it.
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After decades of Gardening, realized, to me, crazy-who-cares-whatever, but I still think it, the bible is the word of G*d written by man.  Nature is the word of G*d written by G*d.  Zero will to push this thinking upon you.  If G*d not your 'deal' fine, Nature is a pure science, as is Garden Design.  Garden Design is no will-o'-the-wisp. 
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From other realms, finding more words, better, describing thoughts transformed into literal experience.
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"Our culture doesn’t think storytelling is sacred; we don’t set aside a time of year for it. We don’t hold anything sacred except what organized religion declares to be so. Artists pursue a sacred call, although some would buck and rear at having their work labeled like this. Artists are lucky to have a form in which to express themselves; there is a sacredness about that, and a terrific sense of responsibility. We’ve got to do it right. Why do we have to do it right? Because that’s the whole point: either it’s right or it’s all wrong."  Ursula Le Guin
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"History is one way of telling stories, just like myth, fiction, or oral storytelling. But over the last hundred years, history has preempted the other forms of storytelling because of its claim to absolute, objective truth. Trying to be scientists, historians stood outside of history and told the story of how it was. All that has changed radically over the last twenty years. Historians now laugh at the pretense of objective truth. They agree that every age has its own history, and if there is any objective truth, we can’t reach it with words. History is not a science, it’s an art."  Ursula Le Guin
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Several years after discovering Bunny Mellon's gardening, I came to understand her topiaries.  Topiaries sprinkled throughout her interiors, and gardens.  She copied the idea of topiaries, and their shapes, from ancient Romans.  Made it her own.  More, shared with all.  With an eye to 'see'.
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"Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day- like writing a poem or saying a prayer."  Anne Morrow-Lindbergh
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A garden view you've created, from inside your home, is the same, to me, as Anne Morrow-Lindbergh discovered arranging a bowl of flowers.  Inherently the same, I think, Bunny Mellon thought of her topiaries, and garden.
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"One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience. There are always areas of vast silence in any culture, and part of an artist’s job is to go into those areas and come back from the silence with something to say. It’s one reason why we read poetry, because poets can give us the words we need. When we read good poetry, we often say, ‘Yeah, that’s it. That’s how I feel."  Ursula Leguin
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Had an aunt that liked to say, often, Life cannot be lived without art.  Loved her, thought her eccentric, time passed, I know she is wise.
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"Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want, too. If we never find our experience described in poetry or stories, we assume that our experience is insignificant."  Ursula Le Guin
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Oddly, have discovered the opposite, about 'insignificant'.  Not in a good way......We assume that our experience is significant if we don't see/read about it elsewhere.  For Garden Design, proof is rampant throughout continents & centuries & cultures, ugly landscapes, landscapes that don't perform, landscapes that kill bees & poison ground water etc.
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Terminally Unique, phrase I learned in a group Lois formed for friends/family of alcoholics.  Until going into that Lois group I was Terminally Unique.  Blessedly, 1st meeting, got the memo.  Not Terminally Unique, merely collateral damage to the alcoholic in my life.  Significant, insignificant, words matter.  Once realization hit, bigly, about being collateral damage, it changed my life.  Anger & expectations left the room.  Once you lose being Terminally Unique, you realize it's been a wild ride having your fur rubbed off, maybe losing an eye, part of a foot, poof, Velveteen Rabbit, you've been loved into being real. 
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Nothing in Garden Design is original.  Nothing.  Over 11,000 years of Garden Design history, and literature, it's been done before.  More, why not choose to work with the greats?  I do.  Copy, it's the first rule of Garden Design. 
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Humorous reading yesterday morning.  Sunday early, cold, sitting by the fire, reading for pleasure, only the cats for company, sun awakening thru 2 walls of windows.  Discovering, more proof of not being original.  Me.  Not original.  Deeply pleasing, sublime.  Pure at-one-with-atonement.
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"We ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far."  Neils Bohr
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"That is why I consider those developments in physics during the last decades which have shown how problematical such concepts as “objective” and “subjective” are, a great liberation of thought. The whole thing started with the theory of relativity. In the past, the statement that two events are simultaneous was considered an objective assertion, one that could be communicated quite simply and that was open to verification by any observer. Today we know that “simultaneity” contains a subjective element, inasmuch as two events that appear simultaneous to an observer at rest are not necessarily simultaneous to an observer in motion. However, the relativistic description is also objective inasmuch as every observer can deduce by calculation what the other observer will perceive or has perceived. For all that, we have come a long way from the classical ideal of objective descriptions."  Neils Bohr
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" In quantum mechanics the departure from this ideal has been even more radical. We can still use the objectifying language of classical physics to make statements about observable facts. For instance, we can say that a photographic plate has been blackened, or that cloud droplets have formed. But we can say nothing about the atoms themselves. And what predictions we base on such findings depend on the way we pose our experimental question, and here the observer has freedom of choice. Naturally, it still makes no difference whether the observer is a man, an animal, or a piece of apparatus, but it is no longer possible to make predictions without reference to the observer or the means of observation. To that extent, every physical process may be said to have objective and subjective features. The objective world of nineteenth-century science was, as we know today, an ideal, limiting case, but not the whole reality. Admittedly, even in our future encounters with reality we shall have to distinguish between the objective and the subjective side, to make a division between the two. But the location of the separation may depend on the way things are looked at; to a certain extent it can be chosen at will."  Neils Bohr

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Maria Popova, quoting Ursula Le Guin, moves on to Neils Bohr, in her Brain Pickings yesterday, adding, "This, Bohr notes, is why the language of objectivity doesn’t belong in religious rhetoric — religion and its pluralities are best understood, and best applied to human life as an instrument of moral enrichment rather than one of dogmatic constriction, through the lens of complementarity:"

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"The fact that different religions try to express this content in quite distinct spiritual forms is no real objection. Perhaps we ought to look upon these different forms as complementary descriptions which, though they exclude one another, are needed to convey the rich possibilities flowing from man’s relationship with the central order."  Neils Bohr

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Maria Popova goes on to write, " Bohr considers whether or not the tenets of religion can similarly offer useful abstractions, even though they are not to be taken as objective truth:

In mathematics we can take our inner distance from the content of our statements. In the final analysis mathematics is a mental game that we can play or not play as we choose. Religion, on the other hand, deals with ourselves, with our life and death; its promises are meant to govern our actions and thus, at least indirectly, our very existence. We cannot just look at them impassively from the outside. Moreover, our attitude to religious questions cannot be separated from our attitude to society. Even if religion arose as the spiritual structure of a particular human society, it is arguable whether it has remained the strongest social molding force through history, or whether society, once formed, develops new spiritual structures and adapts them to its particular level of knowledge. Nowadays, the individual seems to be able to choose the spiritual framework of his thoughts and actions quite freely, and this freedom reflects the fact that the boundaries between the various cultures and societies are beginning to become more fluid. But even when an individual tries to attain the greatest possible degree of independence, he will still be swayed by the existing spiritual structures — consciously or unconsciously. For he, too, must be able to speak of life and death and the human condition to other members of the society in which he’s chosen to live; he must educate his children according to the norms of that society, fit into its life. Epistemological sophistries cannot possibly help him attain these ends. Here, too, the relationship between critical thought about the spiritual content of a given religion and action based on the deliberate acceptance of that content is complementary. And such acceptance, if consciously arrived at, fills the individual with strength of purpose, helps him to overcome doubts and, if he has to suffer, provides him with the kind of solace that only a sense of being sheltered under an all-embracing roof can grant. In that sense, religion helps to make social life more harmonious; its most important task is to remind us, in the language of pictures and parables, of the wider framework within which our life is set."  Neils Bohr

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Humbling to have experienced the conversations, above, practicing the art of Garden Design, garden writing, and gardening.  Finally, to the point, the experience of a Garden, gardening, or topiaries inside, is a conversation.  Whether you think so or not.   Don't have the garden you want?  Take your conversation, between you/your garden to a new level, 2nd order thinking to be exact.
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From Shane Parrish at Farnum Street,

“Second-Order Thinking

In his exceptional book, The Most Important Thing, Howard Marks hits on the concept of second-order thinking, which he calls second-level thinking.

First-level thinking is simplistic and superficial, and just about everyone can do it (a bad sign for anything involving an attempt at superiority). All the first-level thinker needs is an opinion about the future, as in “The outlook for the company is favorable, meaning the stock will go up.” Second-level thinking is deep, complex and convoluted.

Second-order thinkers take into account a lot of what we put into our decision journals. Things like, What is the range of possible outcomes? What’s the probability I’m right? What’s the follow-on? How could I be wrong?

The real difference for me is that first-order thinkers are the people that look for things that are simple, easy, and defendable. Second-order thinkers push harder and don't accept the first conclusion.” Here, Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform

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All I wanted was a pretty garden.  What a ride.  Bull is still bucking.  Hanging on, loving it.

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Karl Jung, "Our lives are about getting the inside to match the outside."  

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Garden & Be Well,  XO T

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Best Color Trinity

Towards the front end of your Garden Design, choose a color trinity for your exterior.  House, furniture, gates, light fixtures, pots, hardware, fencing, watering cans, door mats, knobs, etc.  In addition, choose a name for your home/garden.  Once you've done both, order note cards, name cards, using the color trinity.
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Green-Brown-White is the classic color trinity for over 2,000 years.  Chosen by the best minds across centuries, seemingly chosen by Providence.  Magic in Green-Brown-White ?  It's unique for all permutations.
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Where do I pull colors from for clients?  Inside the house.  Art, furniture, wallpaper, rugs, etc.  Uniformly, once colors suggested, "I love that !"  Of course.


Pic, above, here.
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In addition to Green-Brown-White, you get to choose a subsidiary color/s.  To be used as hints, and also pulled from interiors, especially your art.  Scrumptious Green-Brown-White, below.  Saved for colors but seems more a current USA political poster.


Pic, above, here.
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Through many years of choosing exterior Green-Brown-White, something pops immediately.  At first painting, home/garden recede into their niche, radiating considered contentment, an air of inevitability, and timelessness.   

 
Pic, above, here.
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Humbling, this moth, below.

 
Pic, above, here.

 
Pic, above, here.

 
Pic, above, here.
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Aside from Green-Brown-White, above, all those subsidiary colors.  Be still my heart.
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There's little I encounter, not seen thru a Garden prism.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T
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An answer to my question, yesterday, about Lucinda Wharton:

"Curious about her parents, how they raised this old soul child."

Lady Rebecca Eildon Courtenay (b. 1969), is married to Jeremy Lloyd Wharton; they have three daughters: Alice Lucinda Wharton (b. 1998), Emilia Rose Wharton (b. 1999) and Tatiana Elizabeth Wharton (b. 2002).

-the above from Lucinda Wharton's grandfather's Wikipedia entry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Courtenay,_18th_Earl_of_Devon
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Thank you, The Hunting House, would not have known where to begin.  Lucinda's love for her home in the country, palpable. 

Design Your Garden for Winter (not spring): Beauty All Year

Best epiphany about the garden in winter?  Designing the garden for winter is superior to other seasons.  A garden beautiful in February is beautiful all year.
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Rosemary Verey's book, The Garden in Winter, is your source for this epiphany if you're in a bit of doubt.
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In addition to winter being the best season to create a Garden Design, another realm is included, simplicity.  Into those realms, considered micro, is the full blown macro garden in winter.  Your life. 
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Winter's pace is meant to be.  Winter's events in the garden are meant to be.  Pining for the glories of spring in winter?  Not me, never have.  Winter is deep strength in the garden.  A season controlling how we dress, our circadian cycle, our activity levels, and what the activities are, and more.



Pic, above, here.

At the front end, I knew Garden Design, below, was not for me, my station in life.  Middle class, subdivision, working for a living.  Ten good staff, but they are all on my own hands.  Could not have been more wrong.  Instead of seeing the Garden Design, below, I saw station-in-life.  Guess what else I didn't see, below, at the front end?  Yep, the garden in winter, how to design her. 
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Pic, above, here.
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Now, this is what I know, below.  Garden Design does not vary for station in life, it varies by your intensity of perception, whispering the details, taking them for your own.  In the taking, lives are born.

 
Pic, above, here.
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Garden design, both pics, above, are the same.  Both pics are a complete garden design class for the garden in winter.

 
Pic, above, here.
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Studying historic gardens across the globe for decades, I've been into many art museums in different countries too.  Having the art of Providence, above, in my own garden?  Priceless.  Finding these scenes upon a winter's day, a casual walk/perusal, makes time disappear.  Timelessness of other realms become the reality, the unconscious begins its serious work of creativity, grace, joy, peace, putting connections together. 
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Pic, above, here.

If you don't have a garden work area yet, put thought to it in winter.

 
Pic, above, here.
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The garden in winter is inside your home too.  Mainly from the views looking out, which is where every garden begins.  Bring the garden inside physically, all year, especially in winter.

 
Pic, above, here.
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What shrubs for your zone with bare stems in winter will bud/open when cut & brought inside?  Don't know?  Contact your local Extension Service, etc.

 
Pic, above, here.
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Bulbs usually go on sale in winter, cheap/easy to pot.  Adore this grow box, below, never seen one before.

 
Pic, above, here.
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Bringing a few plants inside for winter, below.  Finally, have done this for myself this year.  Take heart, I'm 30 years into it.  Life was never conducive to interior plants, took the plunge in December.
Discovered a trick, not pleasant at first, about a winter's interior plant table.
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Found at local thrift store for a song, that table, when I moved into my house 2.5 years ago, was stowed with the cats in a back room.  A few fur balls later, the table had a bad side.  No problem, brought table out and put that side next to a wall.
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Life conspired further, work travel.  My pet sitter, cats/chickens, is the best.  But adding topiaries to her duties did not seem polite.  Pulled a leaf up on the mahogany table, placed copper trays filled with water, from Smith/Hawken, for humidity, watered pots/foliage, left for over a week. 
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All was great with chicks/cats and topiaries.  Alas the mahogany dropleaf table.  Unpleasant to be honest, but I've ruined the table.  Took a couple of days to get over the fact of ruining a good piece of furniture.  Get over it I did !
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Whoever gets the table after me, has the choice to keep using it roughly, or refinish.  It's solid, no veneer.  Until then, I have a fabulous interior winter plant table.  Then I noticed other winter plant tables, below, and they are spotted just the same as mine.  On trend, go me.         

 
Pic, above, here.
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Bringing plants inside for winter, below, pay attention to their containers.  I found almost the exact wood container, below, about 3 years ago.  Bought it as a gift for a friend, she brings plants inside.  Then I moved, who knew where that planter went.  Once my topiary order arrived last December I rummaged through the basement.  Found that container, below.  Now it's mine, no thought of giving it away.  Found a classic antique plant stand for it at an estate sale last month too.

 
Pic, above, here.
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Your interior plants don't need to be repotted if you have a variety of soup tureens, clay pots, baskets, other weird containers, to slip them into, below. 
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Soup tureens with a crack or chip are easy to find, and cheap.  Perfect for interior plants.

 
Pic, above, here.
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Bunny Mellon is famous for her topiary use inside, below, all year.  Discovered recently she liked the idea of topiaries after seeing them in ancient Roman artwork.  I've copied her, topiaries, below, are a copy of her, and next maybe you.


Pic, above, here.
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The garden in winter, at its best, below.  How many years have I done these, but outside on my winter patio?  Decades.  Better, branches are easy to procure, free.


Pic, above, here.
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The garden in winter, below.  The pot could be black plastic from the nursery.  Doesn't matter.  Wicker goes with everything. 

 
Pic, above, here.
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Have found several of these containers, below, at thrift stores thru the years.  Line with plastic, add soil, poke a few holes, plant the bulbs.  Done.  Stagger planting times, leave outside, bring inside when started to grow, or skip the outside part.  Don't overthink. 

 
Pic, above, here.
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Perhaps the least understood garden design, for me, at the front end, below.  Glad through-a-glass-darkly became clear.  It's about all year beauty, ease of management, living life in the garden, not living life having to work in the garden. 

 
Pic, above, here.
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Giving a Garden in Winter talk tomorrow, handout, below.  Pay no attention to the plants, it's for our zone 8a.  Plants are first on the handout, yet the most important Garden in Winter facts are at the bottom.  It's all about the Garden Design.
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Have a lovely powerpoint to go with it. 
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It's in a historic church 1 county over.  A large group, and active.  More than gardening, this group is proactive politically, historically, conservation, agriculturally, planning/zoning, and etc.  It's amazing what you learn at Garden Club.  If you think it's all about gardening, it's not.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T

                                TARADILLARD.com

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                                                 AUTHOR, DESIGNER, SPEAKER

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                                                   Beautiful garden, beautiful life.             ******************************************************

                THE GARDEN IN WINTER

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COPYRIGHT 2018  BY TARA DILLARD

PERENNIALS

Carex                                Vinca minor

Rosemary                          Thrift

Thyme                                Dianthus ‘Bath Pink’

Saxifraga stolonifera         Helleborus

Liriope                               Mondo

Christmas Fern

TREES

Prunus mume

Contorted Filbert                     Cryptomeria

Chimonanthus praecox           Crape myrtle

Acer griseum                           Magnolia

Corylopsis glabrescens             Holly

Hamamelis                               Conifers

Tea Olive

SHRUBS

Camellia             Sarcoccoca      Aspidistra       Lonicera fragrantissima

Daphne               Pieris               Skimmia         Boxwood

Quince                Edgeworthia   Anise                Aucuba

Holly                   Kerria             Hydrangea       Azalea

Scotch broom      Plum Yew      Yew                                    

VINES                                 BULBS

Carolina jessamine               Crocus             Winter aconite    Colchicum luteum   Snowdrops

Evergreen clematis               Scilla sibirica     Grape hyacinth     Iris reticulata     Anemone blanda

Jasmine ‘Madison’

DESIGN:  Know What’s Important

Axis                    Trees                    Color             Texture      Photograph/Feb    

Focal Points        Hedges                 Silhouettes   Fragrance   Ruined Table

Paths                   Groundcovers      Line               Rooms       Vanishing Threshold

The Garden In Winter, by Rosemary Verey,  Beautiful By Design, by Tara Dillard

A Southern Garden, by Elizabeth Lawrence ,  The Garden View, by Tara Dillard

Decadent & Austere

Creating a Garden Design I ask for several layers of narrative.  One, a mission statement, no more than 2-3 sentences of what you want from and for your landscape.  Some clients don't have that type of brain, so I ask for 2-3 sentences describing their finished garden.
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Years ago I began keeping journals.  Not written entries of my day/week kind of journals.  Too simple, beyond boring.  Journals to elevate the days/weeks of my life, no matter its days.  In spite of some of those days.
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Several themes emerged.  Both gardens, below, living large one of those themes, pairs of words.  First pairing of words to emerge, Sacred & Profane.  Remains as delightful as first discovered, excepting now an old friend 'pairing'.


Pic, above, here.
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Both gardens, above/below, intensely restrained prosceniums yet overtly decadent in metaphor, Decadent/Austere. 


Pic, above, here.
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A sacred/profane trip to small town, south Georgia, Americana presented itself this Thanksgiving.  Couldn't pass it by.  A courthouse square, and the night of Thanksgiving, lighting of the Christmas tree and strands of lights from the courthouse to ancillary buildings/streets.
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Sacred & Profane, small town, still using religion and commerce.  A total joy, no one deluded.  Not even Santa, he was total game, ahead of turning the lights on, exactly on time, Santa drove around the Courthouse Square in his sleigh, bottom pic, reindeer included. 
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Before pulling Santa, below, the reindeer were corralled and snacking.



Blurry, below, Santa & his reindeer were moving fast around the square.  Santa had to get that tree and lights lit, signalling the beginning of shopping on the square.  Later, I realized I didn't know who paid for the gorgeous extravaganza.  Chamber of commerce, churches, a mix ?  No worries, the crowd was huge, and the underlying intent, profane, honored the sacred.
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Bought a new journal book, shopping on the square, after Santa lit the lights.  The next morning, up early, cozied in a chair by the Christmas village, with coffee and new journal, hoping for something good to enter.  The hotel coming to life, the ladies cooked a fragrant  breakfast, TV tuned to Macy's parade coming on soon.
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Time flew, the reading was good.  Many pairs of words.
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Mystery/Meaning, Creation/Transcendence, Law/Grace, Righteousness/Corruption, Universalism/Particularism, Pious/Secular, Compassion/Violence, Justice/Judging, Prayer/Listening, Ultimate/Common, Mystery/Reason, Ideas/Realities.  Are you conscious of word pairings too?
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With word pairs came quotes.
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"Vocation is a gift not a goal."  Parker Palmer
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"Design at its core, thrives when a human being cares enough to do work that touches another----it doesn't thrive when it gets more efficient."  Seth Godin.
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Before the internet most clients, in their mission statements included, easy-to-maintain, and not-cost-a-lot.  Efficient, yes?
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After the internet I'm not asked to include little maintenance/money.  Why?  Greater understanding of what a good garden is, from those hiring me.  Good gardens don't have low maintenance/cheap in their mission statement.  That paring flows, more deeply, and is inherent, designing a garden that will change your life.  Seth Godin nailed it, again.
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What pair of words describe the garden you have, or want to create?
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Garden & Be Well,   XOT   

Overdose on a Theme: Squares

A 1st order Garden Design rule is to use contrasts for impact, big leaves next to small leaves, burgundy foliage next to chartreuse, rounded tree canopy with a cone shaped tree, and etc.
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A later Garden Design rule, depending upon your character, is to Overdose on a theme, below.
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Design a square garden room with square pavers planted with square beds, pruning plants into squares backdropped with a brick wall of rectangles.  Oooh yes, made me smile. 
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Great scenario proving Garden Design Rules allow total freedom.  Using contrast and overdose a theme, below, for this particular gardener, created emergent behavior.  "Emergent behavior, in many instances the whole seems to take on a life of its own.  Almost dissociated from the specific characteristics of its individual building blocks."  Geoffrey West. 


Pic, above, here.
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Wicked fun creating your own emergent behavior.  Oddly, you'll find your tribe when your garden begins to manifest.  Build it and they will come, is true. 
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All, using Garden Design rules centuries old.  Promise.
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Don't forget, Copy, is one of the first rules of Garden Design.  No two sites are the same, each copy unique, if not totally emergent behavior.  Choice is yours.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T

Sourcing for the Seasons: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years

Creating a container, or several, for the upcoming holidays.  With beauty, and without angst.
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Ingredients easily transposed to what you can source.  Sourcing includes what is 'found' and what is purchased. 
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Focus on the shape of your container/s, and the silhouette of your arrangement.  Shapes to copy, below.  Not your traditional garden container shapes/plantings, more, taking from the realm of Florists.
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Pic, above, here.
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Containers, above/below, expensive, even sourced 2nd hand.  Broaden your scope, retaining visions of these, yet transposing to finds at thrift store, junk shop, side of the road on garbage pick-up day.

 
Pic, above, here.
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Pic, above, here.
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Adore this Halloween party, above.  Pure stage decorating, feels like a true Birthday party celebration for hallowed souls....
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Transposing, above, I've already sourced velvety & feathered red cardinals to set upon branches sprayed white, going up just after Thanksgiving, and remaining thru New Years.  Branches from my woodland, and those cardinals sourced at dollar store.  Two for a dollar to be exact.
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Easy.  I like pretty, and easy.  And the fun of the hunt.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T
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Top 2 pics look like Deborah Silver's work, but didn't see her credited. 

Edward Slingerland: Wu-Wei in the Garden

Most requested by clients/students?  "I don't want to spend a lot of money, it must have little maintenance."  This is what I know for sure.  Replying in detailed response to that pair of demands, via Gardenese language, no one accepts, no one.  From those who have asked, of course.
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"Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons."  Alan Watts, The Way of Zen.
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"Things become complicated only when we think about them."  Alan Watts.



Pic, above, here.
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"Trying to force a lock bends the key.  For which reason a truly intelligent man never forces an issue."  Alan Watts.  (I must try harder to prevent bent-key-thinking.  Better, when bent-key-thinking intrudes into my life, from another, "I'm not listening to your bent-key-thinking.")
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"To have faith is to trust yourself to the water.  When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown.  Instead you relax and float."  Alan Watts.
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Wielding this style Garden Design, above, rich, humorous, humbling.  Further along the Garden Design archetype than whence begun.  Few immune to the Garden Design archetypes path.  Nothing new, existed well before cuneiform records.
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Humorous?  Simplicity, above, gives you, you.  Richest construct in your life, you.
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"We have allowed brain thinking to develop and dominate our lives.  As a consequence, we are at war within ourselves.  The brain desiring things which the body does not want, and the body desiring things which the brain does not allow; the brain giving directions which the body will not follow, and the body giving impulses which the brain cannot "  Alan Watts.
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Funny?  In my garden, there is no 'me'.  In my garden, my body hears what my brain cannot.  In my garden, I am gone, with the body remaining present.  Follow your bliss, find where you experience eternity here, Joseph Campbell truths.  In my garden there is no me, no time, no hunger, no tiredness, no awareness of bruising/bleeding, no sense of want, no fear, expansive joy.  Deeper, at the conclusion of being in my garden, answers arrived to questions known, and unknown, ahead of being in my garden.  Epiphanies from spirit, without fear.
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Seek presence over productivity.  Gaining maximum productivity, though not sought.  .
"All to easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is."  Alan Watts. 
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Before I had a language describing being in my garden I labeled it, "The best selfishness ever."  After a few years realized it is grace.  How could it not be grace?  Epiphanies too many, too potent, life changing.  Bounty of resources, from garden epiphanies, beyond measure.  Into the realm of E.M.Forster describing a multi-millionaire woman, one of his characters, as having no 'resources'.  Interesting.  Letting go, giving up control, is a resource. 
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"The brainy modern loves not matter but measures, no solids but surfaces."  Alan Watts. 
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There are places to "Transcend our futile strategies for controlling life and surrender to its living essence."  In the garden, merely one. 
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"We have been taught to believe that the best way to achieve our goals is to reason about them carefully and strive consciously to reach them. Unfortunately, in many areas of life this is terrible advice. Many desirable states — happiness, attractiveness, spontaneity — are best pursued indirectly, and conscious thought and effortful striving can actually interfere with their attainment."  Edward Slingerland
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Your act of choice, is my Garden Design writing.  Write an article about how to dig a hole?  No longer do I confuse the map for the territory, noise for signal.  Though I'm wicked good about digging a hole with a shovel or auger attached to a Caterpillar.  Pure noise, how to dig a hole if you're wanting a good garden, you in your Garden is signal territory.
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" For the early Chinese thinkers … the culmination of knowledge is understood, not in terms of grasping a set of abstract principles, but rather as entering a state of wu-wei. The goal is to acquire the ability to move through the physical and social world in a manner that is completely spontaneous and yet fully in harmony with the proper order of the natural and human worlds (the Dao or “Way”). Because of this focus on knowing how rather than knowing this or that, the Chinese tradition has spent a great deal of energy over the past two thousand years exploring the interior, psychological feel of wu-wei, worrying about the paradox at the heart of it, and developing a variety of behavioral techniques to get around it. The ideal person in early China is more like a well-trained athlete or cultivated artist than a dispassionate cost-benefit analyzer."  Edward Slinglerland     
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"Our excessive focus in the modern world on the power of conscious thought and the benefits of willpower and self-control causes us to overlook the pervasive importance of what might be called “body thinking”: tacit, fast, and semiautomatic behavior that flows from the unconscious with little or no conscious interference. The result is that we too often devote ourselves to pushing harder or moving faster in areas of our life where effort and striving are, in fact, profoundly counterproductive."  Edward Slingerland. 
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Clients with gardens getting-there the fastest?  All women, ages 40+, and a gay couple who travel the globe for their work, and are 30+/50+. 
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"Some of the most elusive objects of our incessant pursuits are happiness and spontaneity, both of which are strikingly resistant to conscious pursuit."  Maria Popova
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" Wu-wei literally translates as “no trying” or “no doing,” but it’s not at all about dull inaction. In fact, it refers to the dynamic, effortless, and unselfconscious state of mind of a person who is optimally active and effective. People in wu-wei feel as if they are doing nothing, while at the same time they might be creating a brilliant work of art, smoothly negotiating a complex social situation, or even bringing the entire world into harmonious order. For a person in wu-wei, proper and effective conduct follows as automatically as the body gives in to the seductive rhythm of a song. This state of harmony is both complex and holistic, involving as it does the integration of the body, the emotions, and the mind. If we have to translate it, wu-wei is probably best rendered as something like “effortless action” or “spontaneous action.” Being in wu-wei is relaxing and enjoyable, but in a deeply rewarding way that distinguishes it from cruder or more mundane pleasures."  Edward Slingerland.
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"We’re drawn to people with wu-wei, Slingerland argues, because we inherently trust the automatic, unconscious mind due to a simple fact from the psychology of trust — because spontaneity is hard to fake, we intuit that spontaneous people are authentic and thus trustworthy. But Western thought has suffered from centuries of oppressive dualism, treating intuition and the intellect as separate and often conflicting faculties — a toxic myth that limits us as a culture and as individuals. Fortunately, Slingerland points out, recent decades have brought a more embodied view of cognition acknowledging the inextricable link between thought and feeling and debunking, as Ray Bradbury so eloquently did, the false divide between emotion and rationality. (We’ve seen, too, that metaphorical thinking is central to our cognitive development, and metaphor is itself rooted in emotion.) The Chinese tradition, on the other hand, has a millennia-long history of cultivating a more integrated model of the human experience..."  Maria Popova .
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If you haven't discovered Maria Popova yet, you're going to be glad you have now.
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Letting go, and finding eternity, in the garden, has made my life.  Those in my tribe, share this joy.  This is your garden.  Not me writing about when to deadhead your peonies. 
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Within each Garden Design, from a historic template, wu-wei/grace/abiding, is the bonus.  Guaranteed. 
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T

Mastering the Art of Garden Design: Not What You Think

At the front end of planning your garden, from personal experience, if there is a problem with the outcome, those problems reside in you, not the garden.
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Assumptions about where to begin, "What plants will I have?", wildly, achingly, charmingly, sweetly, misplaced.  Going a step further, I did, decades ago, realized my initial assumptions beyond arrogant.  Worse, arrogance aimed at Nature.  There for me to wield.  Ha.
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Before we have language, we see Nature.  For most that unspoken language, remains throughout life.  Seeing through a glass darkly, thinking as a child type of stuff.
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Getting the horticulture degree, still, did not unlock the door to creating a beautiful garden, understanding Nature's language.  Off to Europe for decades studying historic gardens.  Designing/installing gardens all the while as vocation.  Dots on the Garden Design map emerged, some connected.  Map is not territory. 
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Having lunch at a client's farm, decades from my starting dot, standing inside her kitchen, looking through to the potager, a dot, outside the realm of Garden Design, appeared, and connected all the  dots.  The master dot.  Epiphanies are a drug of choice.  This one simple, seen since birth, yet zero comprehension for decades. 
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Providence never separated ornamental horticulture from agriculture.  Man's folly, made the separation.  Separation dot date?  Onset of the Industrial Revolution, late 19th century.  Until then we  lived with Nature.  The dot was clear.  Without it, death.
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"The eighteenth century was the culmination of thousands of years of agrarian society.  The nineteenth century would bring in the Industrial Revolution to America.  Until then, most societies based their economies on the raising and trading of crops, so nature was always in control.  People measured the work day by the rising and setting of the sun, and one hailstorm or flood could ruin a year's work.  Everyday life was an ongoing struggle against nature.
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Historically when people have been able to raise enough crops and food to sustain a comfortable life, they have challenged nature even further by turning their outdoor environment into a living art form, a pleasure garden.  Most societies have even given the garden religious significance.
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A garden is a balance between measured, human control on one hand and wild, mystical nature on the other.  It is the place where humans attempt to create their particular vision of an idealized order of nature and culture.  A garden is not just the opposition of unpredictable nature and organized society; it is the mediating space between them.  Human intellect, intuition, nurture, and spirit meld together in a garden.  Since culture shapes both the form and meaning of a garden at a particular place and time....."  Barbara Sarudy, Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake, 1700-1805.     


Pic, above, here.

How little can you have in your Garden Design?  When I design a garden, the last question I ask myself, "What can I take away, and it holds together?"
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Inside a garden, above.  Outside a garden, below.
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Ironically, at every price point client, I'm told, "I don't want to spend a lot of money.  It must be easy to take care of."  These gardens, above/below.  Get it right.  Macro and micro.  Master dot.  Maximum pollinator habitat exists where hi density meets low density.  No, this garden isn't agriculture for man, it is agriculture for Nature.  Hence, us.
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Feed the bees. Without them we perish.  Basic.  Simple.  Nature knows, we forgot.  More to this Nature 'stuff', Barbara Saludy alluded to it richly, above.  Cadence.  Will get to that another day. 

 
Pic, above, here.
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One of the most potent Garden Designs you'll see, above.  Tara Turf, meadow mowed at differing heights, with a mix of plantings suitable to the zone, attracting myriad insects, attracting myriad mammals, (reptiles too, love my lizards), in turn attracting different genres of insects, mammals to the hedging and wild wood beyond.  Nature in full cycle, master dot included, high density mixed with low density.  While providing for property value increases, HVAC expense decreases, less maintenance, no chemicals, no irrigation.  Easily maintained with unskilled labor.  Of course the goal is to maintain as much as you can yourself, placing mind/body/soul into Nature's realm, Nature's cadence.  As long as you can.   
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Designing gardens, I design simple.  As requested.  After the concept plan, it's normal to receive requests for more 'stuff'.  Here's the negotiation.  Put this plan in first, if you want more later, easy.  Of course the final plan always includes a few of those extras.  If I don't put them in, the client will liberally dose the garden themselves.  Better to be like Barney Fife, Nip It.
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With a proper garden design, epiphanies daily.  Epiphanies that will change your life.  How could Nature not do that for you?  Example?  It's almost fall, when the trees drop their leaves, baring themselves naked ahead of winter, they are being fed by what they let go of.
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Meditate on that.
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Garden & Be Well,   XO T

Stone & Flow Garden Design

Macro: Islands in the gravel, no edges.  Meandering flow, as if the gravel were water.
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Micro: Small space, high function, drifts of plantings make the space 'larger' axis views into beauty from the home.
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Crazy: Using green-meatballs and I like them.


Pic, above, here.
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Garden Design Class, above, in a single pic.  Color echoes a delight, furniture choices/materials perfect.
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Garden & Be Well,    XOT
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Thank you for continued calls, texts, emails about Harvey in Houston.  Mom is dry, kept her power, worst damage are fronds from her palm trees fell.  She said they needed pruning anyway.  Many homes in her neighborhood flooded.  Sister still evacuated, home is dry, and a scare this morning with new mandatory evacuations placed on her neighborhood.  Put her address into the interactive map, she's 4 blocks away.  Hundreds of homes already flooded in her neighborhood, ahead of this new mandatory evacuation.  Keeping hope, she too stays dry.  Prayers for all, people/pets/wildlife/livestock, affected by Harvey.

Creating Vanishing Threshold & Double Axis

The list is long, all the things not taught about designing gardens.  How do you know, what you don't know?  You don't.  What to do?  Obvious.  Start making your own list of Garden Design principles.
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I took this Garden Design Principle, below, early in my career.  A completely arrogant swoop, yet a huge layer of Garden Design.  Vanishing Threshold, my name for it.
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In the garden, designing your garden, the Garden Design process owns every view into your home.  Are we looking, below, at the back of a TV?  Not in my realm.  Nor yours.
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Pic, above, here.

In the garden, looking into your windows, are the views so titillating I must go inside and see everything?  Every window?  No?  Hop on it.
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When you're done with this, I must go into your home, and see a beautiful garden view from every window, Double Axis.
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Again, hop to it.
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T
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Notice the color echoes from a few of those dahlias to the chairs?  Layers of narrative.
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That ghastly moment I meet someone, they discover what I do, and ask, "My plant ......?".  A bit more to it than that.  I drift away, but not here.   It's Babette's Feast, cooking to the sister's directions, when it's to the depths, as a starting point, where I Garden.  "In the course of that dinner, his host, General Galliffet, recounted the surprising story of the extraordinary chef of this superb restaurant who, "quite exceptionally," was a woman. This incomparable chef had the great gift of transforming a dinner into "a kind of love affair" that "made no distinction between bodily appetite and spiritual appetite."  
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"Cuisine is a practice of everyday life, to invoke Michel de Certeau a last time—or even better, as the French title of his book has it, cuisine is an art of "making do" (les arts de faire). Babette is an artist of the everyday, but one who also, when given the opportunity, moves in the more exalted public circles of the spectacular. More obviously humble, the cook works with what is available; the spectacular appears in the parallel transformation wrought by the great artist-chef. This dialectic of everyday life confronting extraordinary spectacle plays out in so many circumstances and assumes so many guises as to be constitutive of French cuisine. The connection between the everyday and the spectacular also controls the continuum between cooking and chefing. The culinary roles of cook and chef imperfectly coincide with the status designations of cook and chef. Thought to be acook and actually the cook for thirteen years, Babette reveals herself to be a great chef. Just as clearly, her "chefing" depends on the cooking that also informs the everyday life of the community."
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"A second article of faith in Babette's Feast is the certainty of the instantaneous and direct power of art. Like grace, like the mercy invoked by the pastor early in the film and the general at the end, art touches individuals of every station, even against their will. "
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"Just as the meal in the film effaces the discord among the disciples, so, too, Babette's Feast uses the senses to illuminate and transcend the everyday. The film mutes the political because it takes us beyond conflict. "
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Quotes, above, entirety, below, Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 187-201 of Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2004 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press.

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Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson
Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine
©2004, 272 pages, 10 halftones, 11 line drawings
Cloth $25.00 ISBN: 978-0-226-24323-8
Paper $22.50 ISBN: 978-0-226-24324-5

For information on purchasing the book—from bookstores or here online—please go to the webpage for Accounting for Taste.

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Babette's Feast A Fable for Culinary France Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson Excerpt from Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine "Among the many films that center on food at the end of the twentieth century, Babette's Feast (Babettes Gaestebud) stands out for its reach and for the subtlety of its sensuality. For this film depicts far more than food and foodways; it shows more than the sensuality of food in our lives. Paradoxically, this Danish film tells an exemplary tale of French cuisine. Its portrayal of a French cook far from France evokes the French culinary landscape even more than the Danish countryside where it is set. . Surely it is appropriate that the cinema supply the iconic culinary text of the twentieth century. Film captures, as a photograph cannot, the interactive process that culinary art requires. More immediately than print and like cuisine itself, film conveys a sensory awareness that embraces the viewer as the more intellectual medium cannot. Just as the written recipe can only suggest the sensory, so words inevitably fail to convey the comprehensive, all-enveloping sensuality of taste. The immediacy achieved by the moving narrative raises Babette's Feast to iconic status well above the short story by Isak Dinesen from which it is drawn. Through its exploitation of the sensory, the film transforms a "story from the human heart," as Dinesen puts it in the narrative frame of the original story, into an emblem of French culinary culture. . Brought to the screen in 1987 by the Danish director Gabriel Axel, Babette's Feast arguably inaugurated what the past twenty-five years or so have consecrated as a veritable cinematic genre—the food film. From the exuberantly sexual foreplay of the couple devouring a turkey leg in Tom Jones (1963) to the Taiwanese Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) and the fluffy paean to the senses, Chocolat (2000), with many films in between, the food film has become a staple in the cinematic larder, another sign of the salience of food in the larger culture today. We all have our favorite from this lengthy roster. Indeed, based on the sheer number of food films, it would seem that just about every group that lays claim to a cuisine now has a film to tell the world about it. Babette's Feast shares many characteristics with other food films. First and foremost, it lovingly details the many pleasures of food, though unlike many others it does not equate the sensory with the sexual. More than others, however, and conspicuously more than Isak Dinesen's short story, it celebrates the senses. It invests cuisine—very pointedly French cuisine—with incomparable transformative powers. The spectacular repast that crowns the film conjures up a vision of spiritual well-being created by the transcendent artistry of a chef who sacrifices all for her art and, through that art, recreates her country. This restitution of place and resurrection of time makes the most powerful case yet for the intimate drama of culinary metamorphosis. I. Babette's Feast takes place in a remote seaside village in Jutland, the site of an especially strict Lutheran sect. The beautiful young daughters of the founder of the sect renounce suitors from the outside world who would have taken them away from their father, their village, and their religion. Martine (named for Martin Luther) rejects an aristocratic, worldly army officer, and Philippa (named for Luther's friend Phillip Melancton) turns down the offer of Achille Papin, a visiting French opera star, to sing in Paris, where he promises to make her a star. Years pass; neither sister marries. The two devote their lives to good works and keeping their now-dead father's spirit alive. . One evening some thirty-five years later, in September 1871, in the midst of a driving rainstorm, a bedraggled and visibly exhausted woman appears on the doorstep of the two sisters, who are now in late middle age. The stranger bears a letter of introduction from Achille Papin, who remembers his idyll in rural Denmark as a very special, because so very different, time and place in his life. He asks the sisters to take in the woman, a refugee from the civil war raging in Paris in which her husband and son were both brutally killed "like rats." She herself, his letters informs them, barely escaped with her life. Babette Hersant has lost her family, her country, her language, and, as it turns out, her art. She is beaten, desolate, and desperate to be taken in. Such is the simplicity of the sisters' life that they scarcely know what to do with a servant, even one who will work for no wages. Nevertheless, they take her in, and Babette—played by the luminous Stïphane Audran—soon becomes indispensable to them and to those whom they succor. The slight but significant touches that she brings to the daily fare make the food more palatable—and even, in a term that seems foreign to this strict Protestant sect, pleasurable. Babette insists on the quality of foodstuffs as she bargains in rudimentary but effective Danish with the grocer and the fishmonger, both of whom she astounds with her insistence on superior vegetables and absolutely fresh fish. It is clear that no one else gives such care to the quality of material ingredients or makes use of the herbs that she gathers in the fields overlooking the sea and hangs in her kitchen. . When Babette leaves for a time and the sisters return to their task of dispensing their own unappetizingly brown ale-bread soup to the poor, one old man testily throws his spoon down when served the meal that had been perfectly acceptable before Babette's arrival. Once good taste is learned, there is no return. Another ends his prayers with thanks to God for sending Babette. The sisters sense rather than actually know that food tastes better, although they know for sure that their financial state has greatly improved since this foreigner came to them. Into this world disdainful of earthly delights, Babette subtly presses claims for the life around us. In a telling aesthetic gesture that sets her apart from the rest of the villagers, she washes the windows of the cottage to let the light and beauty of the outside world into the dark interior. . Fourteen years pass. The sisters make plans to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of their father's birth. This celebration comes at a crucial moment: like many other sects after the loss of a charismatic founder, the disciples have fallen to squabbling and backbiting. The sisters hope that the simple repast that they envision will make whole what time and travail have sundered and thus will restore the spiritual harmony of their early church. At this point, Babette receives a letter from France with the news that she has won ten thousand francs in the state lottery. A child of misfortune, she has quite suddenly been made fortunate. After much thought, she requests permission to prepare the commemorative feast for the sisters and the community of believers, but she wants to do so on her own terms, as a "real French dinner." She also insists on paying for it. The sisters reluctantly grant her request. They assume that this will be the last meal she will make for them before she returns to France a rich woman. After a journey to marshal supplies that she has ordered from France, Babette returns at the head of a great procession of foodstuffs, including gleaming candelabra and silverware, elegant china and table linens, cases of wine, a calf's head, several quails in a cage, and an enormous live turtle that gives Martine nightmares. . Horrified at what they fear will turn into a "witches' Sabbath," the sisters warn the community, begging forgiveness in advance. Like the early Christian martyrs, they determine to meet the presence of evil with resignation, in silence, with their minds on heaven, not earth. No one will think about the food. "It will be as if we never had the sense of taste," says one of the disciples. The sisters' apprehension only increases as Babette sets about preparing the meal. "Surely that isn't wine?" Martine asks in fear and trembling. "No, that isn't 'wine,'" Babette replies indignantly. "It's Clos de Vougeot 1845," the strange name only enhancing Martine and Philippa's sense of foreboding. With the help of a young boy engaged for the occasion, Babette slaughters, cooks, sifts, bakes, stirs, irons, polishes, burnishes. The dinner brings an unexpected guest, Lorens Loewenhielm, the army officer and suitor of Martine from years before, who is now a general. As before, he is visiting his aunt nearby and will accompany her to the celebratory dinner. . The general is an essential figure for the culinary narrative, because he knows, as the others do not, what he is eating. The bubbly drink that one disciple reckons a kind of lemonade, he recognizes as a Veuve Cliquot 1860. More and more astounded as the meal proceeds, Loewenhielm comes to the realization that the only place that could have produced such a repast was the renowned Cafï Anglais in Paris whose signature dishes included the very "entombed quail" (cailles en sarcophage) that they are now consuming. As a young man posted to Paris, he had been honored at a memorable dinner at the very place. In the course of that dinner, his host, General Galliffet, recounted the surprising story of the extraordinary chef of this superb restaurant who, "quite exceptionally," was a woman. This incomparable chef had the great gift of transforming a dinner into "a kind of love affair" that "made no distinction between bodily appetite and spiritual appetite." The entombed quail were her invention. . General Loewenhielm never seeks to learn how this dish, which he determines to be absolutely authentic, has appeared in such an unlikely venue. Under the circumstances, his silence is appropriate: explanation is neither necessary nor significant. Like the other guests, Loewenhielm accepts this manna from heaven as a sign of grace to be received without question and with boundless gratitude. The twelve at table, with Babette in the kitchen preparing the transformative red wine and bread, make this pointedly a last supper. Even the quail in their tombs suit a dinner where death is so present. The guests are themselves very elderly, and their thoughts turn frequently to the fate that awaits them in the hereafter, the punishments that will be meted out for past sins. The hymn that Philippa sings after dinner poignantly invokes the end of life, when all will be reconciled: "The sand in our hourglass will soon run out / The day is conquered by the night / The glories of the world are ending / So brief their day, so swift their flight / God, let thy brightness ever shine / Admit us to Thy mercy divine." . Unmistakably, that reconciliation has already occurred around the dinner table, where Babette has indeed worked magic. Her feast has renewed friendships, restored love, and revived the harmony of the community. No one, in the end, can ignore the transcendent power of taste correctly rendered. General Loewenhielm comes to the realization that "in this beautiful world of ours, all things are possible." The other guests become just tipsy enough to open themselves, quite against their will, to the wonder of the material world and to corporeal pleasure. One guest rejects the water that is served late in the dinner, reaching avidly instead for the wine that she first tasted with such visible foreboding. Smiles on the erstwhile dour faces translate an inner well-being, the contentment of simply being. Poignantly, the departing congregants join hands to sing one final hymn as they dance in a circle under the stars in a crystal clear sky: "The clock strikes and time goes by: / Eternity is nigh. / Let us use this time to try / To serve the Lord with heart and mind. / So that our true home we shall find. / So that our true home we shall find." It is, after all, the Christmas season, and the birth of their founder on December 15th precedes by only a few days the birth of their Savior. . Babette remains in the kitchen during the entire dinner. The serving boy moves between the dining room and the kitchen as he follows Babette's careful instructions about what and how much to serve whom in which glass. The camera cuts back and forth between these two rooms, dwelling lovingly on close-ups of the dishes being prepared and being served, the wine poured and sipped. In other words, the cinematic observer sees everything in the harmony of production and consumption. Babette is joined in the kitchen by one guest, the general's coach driver, to whom she serves every dish. In an addition that is at once authentic and comic, his frequently voiced response—"that's good"—expresses the deep satisfaction that the vow of silence will not allow the other guests to express. Only toward the end of the meal does Babette allow herself to savor the magnificent old burgundy that she has dispensed so prodigally. Only at the very end does she eat the incomparable meal that she has prepared (even then she remains standing). When the guests leave, Martine and Philippa come to the kitchen to compliment her on the meal and prepare to say good-bye. Babette quietly reveals that she was the head chef at the Cafï Anglais to whose artistry the general paid such eloquent testimony. . She also stuns her employers in another way: she will not return to France—ever. There is no place for her there; everyone dear to her has died, the world she knew has disappeared. Besides, she has no money. The sisters are dumbfounded to learn that Babette spent her entire lottery winnings on the dinner—just what a dinner for twelve would cost at the Cafï Anglais, she states matter-of-factly. The sisters are taken aback at her sacrifice. "It was not just for you," Babette responds. She has proven her powers, performed her art. She has made her guests happy just as she had at the Cafï Anglais. "That's what Papin knew"—an artist himself, the opera singer recognized their kinship, their common pursuit of artistic excellence, their fulfillment in bringing pleasure. She subscribes to Papin's pronouncement that "Throughout the world sounds one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me the chance to do my very best." Babette has had a last chance to give of her very best, so that, contrary to what Martine fears, she cannot be poor: "an artist is never poor." For the first time, Philippa embraces her servant in an act of love that at once acknowledges the claims of the artist and her right to sacrifice. Babette will reap one final reward. In this film that balances visions of the hereafter with sights of the here and now, Philippa, the other artist as singer, admits Babette to the paradise of the righteous. Though a Catholic—Papist, in the sisters' lexicon—Babette will dwell in the New Jerusalem promised in the opening hymn and toward which the disciples yearn. In heaven, with its promised meeting of righteousness and bliss, Babette's art will "delight the angels!" Echoing the words that Achille Papin had written to her fourteen years before, Philippa assures Babette that in heaven she will be the artist God meant her to be. . Not surprisingly, the commentary that Babette's Feast has occasioned sets those who are interested in the food against those who engage the religious dimensions of the film. Among the former, beginning with the Copenhagen restaurateur who supervised the presentation of food in the film, we can count the cooks who set out to turn the fabled repast into a real dinner. One of the most prominent French gastronomic critics criticized the film on just this score, condemning the pretentiousness of the feast and the egregious historical error of making a woman head chef in a restaurant such as the Cafï Anglais. Academic commentary, on the other hand, has delved into the religious interpretation, a topic on which French film critics seem to have had little to say. Perhaps the pietistic Lutheranism of the film is as alien for the largely Catholic French as Babette's cuisine was for her Lutheran guests. No one, however, not even the foodies who have made Babette's Feast a cult film, has seriously explored the film as a paradigm for French cuisine, and specifically what that cuisine stands for in the late twentieth century. For it is not the single repast, however glorious, that speaks to French cuisine today; rather, it is that meal within the larger conception of food and the proper relations in the culinary contract that ties cook to producers and to consumers. "I made them happy," Babette says with pride. That happiness is the accomplishment of great art and of great love, of the material with which the artist works, and of the public that she serves. . Its everydayness sets the culinary apart from other arts. Cuisine is a practice of everyday life, to invoke Michel de Certeau a last time—or even better, as the French title of his book has it, cuisine is an art of "making do" (les arts de faire). Babette is an artist of the everyday, but one who also, when given the opportunity, moves in the more exalted public circles of the spectacular. More obviously humble, the cook works with what is available; the spectacular appears in the parallel transformation wrought by the great artist-chef. This dialectic of everyday life confronting extraordinary spectacle plays out in so many circumstances and assumes so many guises as to be constitutive of French cuisine. The connection between the everyday and the spectacular also controls the continuum between cooking and chefing. The culinary roles of cook and chef imperfectly coincide with the status designations of cook and chef. Thought to be acook and actually the cook for thirteen years, Babette reveals herself to be a great chef. Just as clearly, her "chefing" depends on the cooking that also informs the everyday life of the community. . That Dinesen defied historical accuracy to promote a woman to the official, public status of chef has, I think, to do with a desire to emphasize the connection between culinary extremes. Haute cuisine and everyday cooking lie at different ends of the same continuum. Babette's Feast makes the same point about music. The hymns that provide most of the music in the film articulate and express the faith of the community, just as the duet from Mozart's Don Giovanni that Achille Papin teaches Philippa signifies her situation with him. The seductiveness of the music reinforces the scene of seduction that Papin and Philippa perform and then begin to experience. Philippa, apparently fearful of her growing involvement with Papin, chooses to discontinue her lessons. She refuses a life on the stage, as Babette chooses not to return to France. Yet like Babette, Philippa, Papin's "beautiful soprano of the snows," continues to illuminate the humbler setting. The wonderful, immensely satisfying world of music includes hymns as well as Mozart. Papin is sure that he will hear Philippa's voice in paradise. Both women use their gift in lesser settings to make people happy, to express joy, to illuminate everyday life. It is then altogether fitting that Philippa should be the one to pay homage to Babette as an artist, repeating to Babette the very words that Papin had written her so many years before. . A second article of faith in Babette's Feast is the certainty of the instantaneous and direct power of art. Like grace, like the mercy invoked by the pastor early in the film and the general at the end, art touches individuals of every station, even against their will. Surely it is not stretching things too far to see this story as Dinesen's contribution to the debate over mass culture that was raging in the 1950s when she wrote "Babette's Feast." Against the contemnors of so-called mass society, the film, like Dinesen's short story, proposes an overwhelmingly optimistic, consistently elevated view of art, artists, and society. Against virtually all that we know about the socialization of taste—just ask anyone who has urged a child to try something new—Babette's Feast affirms the immediate accessibility of new and strange foods. The artist creates for the untutored no less than for the connoisseur. The young Philippa, Papin promises, will sing for the emperor but also for the young working girls from the poor neighborhoods. The general articulates his pleasure; his coachman in the kitchen says no more than "that's good," while the others say nothing at all. If the first appreciation is the more knowledgeable, the transformation of the silent diners offers the more eloquent testimony to the power of culinary art. . So, too, the viewers of the film do not need to have experienced "a real French dinner" to fall under the spell of the feast that Babette prepares. Nor do we need to recognize the hymns or identify the works by Mozart and Rossini to be moved by the music and to grasp its significance for the film. These two performing arts, music and cuisine, speak to the senses directly; their effect is all in the moment. Critical appreciation enhances the experience by increasing understanding, but the senses make the primal connection. The film works so well because it joins taste (food) and hearing (music) to the conforming and informing power of sight. Each becomes greater in the presence of the others—much as a fine meal requires companionship and presentation as well as perfect consumption. . Babette's Feast illuminates the connection between culinary production and the act of consumption. Not only is each a function of the other, neither can be conceived without the other. The truism that links production and consumption aside—food exists to be consumed—works about food and about cuisine, like works throughout literary and cinematic history, tend to focus on the one at the expense of the other. Notably, this film appeared as adventurous chefs were capturing the attention of the media in France and abroad. Babette's promotion, or, better yet, her elevation, is appropriate in an increasingly international food culture. To be sure, this feast is Babette's, the Christ figure who sacrifices for the spiritual good and material contentment of the community. Nevertheless, and like the Last Supper on which it is loosely modeled, this feast is all about public participation. Cuisine, this film tells us as it continually cuts back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, is a social relationship. II. The incongruity of Babette's cuisine in isolated Jutland is dramatized in this film of many distances. The Danish director worked with a short story set in Norway written in English by a Danish author. Jutland itself is distant from any world that we know. It exists in a world unto itself out of historical time. Yet the concerns of the villagers—to live a righteous life, to dedicate the self to God—are eternal and timeless. Drama enters this self-contained community when outsiders intrude, however momentarily. The aristocratic army officer from the Danish court who has spent time in Paris, the French opera singer, and Babette, the French refugee, insert this tale into history, mark it as a modern fable, and, most important, connect it to the larger world of politics and of art. These outsiders situate the film not vaguely, in a nineteenth century that differs little from the seventeenth, but in the midst of a century wracked by social, economic, and political change. The politics that the film barely hints at—as we shall see, Dinesen's text is much more explicit—make Babette's Feast also a tale of France. In addition, if the political resonance is muted, the artistic context is very much present, through the opera singer from Paris and most of all through Babette's accomplishment in French cuisine. . In contrast with the timelessness of the religious community, the French chronology is remarkably precise. Babette arrives in September 1871. In his letter of introduction, Papin recalls that he had been in Jutland thirty-five years previously, that is, in 1836. Assuming that the sisters were born in the 1820s, they would be in their mid-sixties when Babette makes her festive meal fourteen years after her arrival, thus in 1885. Although thirty-five years places the younger Papin's previous stay in Jutland during the July Monarchy (1830-48), the period that he evokes so lovingly, the era that acclaimed his art, is the Second Empire (1852-70). The regime of Napoleon III went down in humiliating defeat to the Prussians in 1870 and set the scene for the Commune of 1871 that the Third Republic (1870-1940) repressed so cruelly, forcing Babette to flee. . Like Papin's beloved empress, Babette will spend the rest of her life in exile. Her past is the Commune as well as the Cafï Anglais, the brutality of repression as much as the opulence of gastronomy. Her husband and son were executed. She can count herself fortunate to have gotten out of the country alive. She has lost everything except her art. The contemporary engraving shown briefly during Martine's reading of Papin's letter of introduction shows a firing squad at work. (Estimates of the number killed during this period range from 20,000 to 25,000.) The irony of Babette's situation becomes even greater when we realize that the man who proclaimed that the chef at the Cafï Anglais was the only woman worth fighting a duel for—in General Loewenhielm's narrative of his dinner at the Cafï Anglais—was General Galliffet, the man known in leftist circles as the "butcher of the Commune" because of his capricious brutality in executing Communards. . Babette's Feast holds the viewer with the beauty of the here and now and especially with the pleasures of the flesh. It speaks to the senses. Sight and sound supplement the gustatory, for which, in the event, they necessarily substitute. We cannot taste the feast that Babette prepares and her guests consume. Yet though we cannot be moved directly by the foods as they are, we are seduced vicariously, through the vision and the music with which the film envelops the viewer. This focus on the sensual joys of the present defines the film and, I dare say, has everything to do with its original popularity and its subsequent cult status. Just how distinctive a feature this appeal to the sensory is in the film emerges from a comparison with Dinesen's story. At first glance a faithful rendering of the story, the film in fact diverges significantly from the original text. Its lessons differ, and the means of instruction differ as well. Gabriel Axel's film, quite unlike Dinesen's narrative, is a fable for the French, an iconic projection of and for French culinary culture. That Axel is not French only renders the homage to French cuisine all the more striking, all the more worthy of our notice. Its very foreignness allows Babette's Feast the greater testimony to the prestige that continues to accrue to French cuisine abroad as well as at home. . Distinct emphases appear on every level of the film, beginning with chronology. In contrast with the short story on which it is based, Babette's Feast ages the sisters by fifteen years or so, so that they are in their late forties when Babette arrives and in their mid-sixties for the final feast, not, as Dinesen's chronology would have them, in their mid-thirties and late forties respectively. The advanced age of the sisters; the greater expanse of time separating youthful visions and hopes from trials and disappointments in the present; the visibly aged faces; Babette's spending fourteen with the sisters before winning the lottery, not twelve; the presence of death and concern with the hereafter—all reinforce the elegiac quality of the film. The overpowering idea of life ending, the impulse to meditate on one's life course and the choices one has made, the anxious contemplation of the future—render the euphoria produced by the meal more dramatic, the prospect of rejuvenation more entrancing. . If Dinesen's disciples and even General Loewenhielm appear somewhat foolish, her Babette is both mysterious and forceful. When Philippa reproaches Babette for giving away everything she had for their sake, Axel's Babette rectifies quietly and rather sadly, "It was not just for you." In reply to Martine's assertion that she will be poor henceforth, she observes simply, "an artist is never poor." By contrast, Dinesen dwells at length on the same sequence, which is both longer and stronger than in the film. Babette gives a look of perhaps "pity, even scorn," and replies categorically to Martine, "For your sake?…No. For my own." Then, not as a reply but as a claim to distinction, she twice declares, "I am a great artist." Appearances notwithstanding, she will never be poor: "A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor. We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing." Thus, Dinesen depicts a forcefully assertive artist who proclaims her rights, affirms her superiority, and underscores her distinction from the sisters and, indeed, from their entire world. Artists, Dinesen impresses upon us, are a breed apart. The common humanity of which the film makes so much figures minimally in the short story. . The assertiveness of Dinesen's Babette suits a brooding, passionate figure whose unplumbed depths frighten the fearful sisters and whose artistic persona is of a piece with her political personage. In fact, Dinesen makes much more of the political context than does the film. Her Babette comes not simply as a refugee from a civil war in which her husband and son were killed, but as herself an active participant in that war. Papin's letter introduces Babette as a Communard. Arrested as a Pïtroleuse—the term used, Papin explains, for women who used petroleum to set fire to houses—she has "narrowly escaped the blood-stained hands of General Galliffet." The narrowness of her escape is even clearer if we recollect that the French army crushed the Commune at the end of May 1871. Babette arrives at the sisters' cottage the very next month, "haggard and wild-eyed like a hunted animal." Soon she was "held in awe" by them because of her bargaining prowess in the marketplace. For the disciples, she appeared "the dark Martha in the house of their two fair Marys." Speaking little of their language, she would sit brooding silently, "her dark eyes wide open, as enigmatical and fatal as a Pythia upon her tripod." Not surprisingly with such a comparison, the sisters are terrified by the notion that their trusted servant had been an incendiary. . Finally, Dinesen dwells at length upon the cosmic irony of Babette's serving a man who had dined with the very General Galliffet who was responsible for the deaths of her son and husband. The irony is all the greater given the reason that Babette did not return to Paris. All those whom she had served at the Cafï Anglais, the elite whom she battled so fiercely on the barricades of the Commune and whose names she gives, were gone. However cruel, however oppressive, "those people belonged to me, they were mine," because they alone had the understanding to appreciate what a great artist she was. Less than that will not do. She cites Papin: "it is terrible and unbearable to an artist to be encouraged to do, to be applauded for doing, his second best." She will not return to a world that will reward the also-ran. This is the "perspective of tragedy" that so moves the sisters, a tragedy that they sense without understanding. Until she tells them, the sisters have no idea of Babette's art. They can remember none of the dishes that they had eaten. They are most certainly not the ideal public that Babette craves. . Gabriel Axel's film softens Babette considerably, largely by muting her politics and assertiveness while strengthening her portrayal as artist. No mention is made of her past as a Pïtroleuse, and since she arrives in Jutland in September, not June, Babette is more distanced from the bloody events of the Commune. General Galliffet's name is mentioned only once, by General Loewenhielm at dinner, and only in reference to his role as a consummate gastronome. (That Dinesen explains his role in the suppression of the Commune undoubtedly speaks to a sense that few readers would have any notion of General Galliffet.) The irony of Babette's serving Loewenhielm, who once dined with Galliffet, comes only in retrospect and with knowledge that the film does not give. Nor does she list the people who "belonged" to her, describe the world that has disappeared, or say anything about the insufferableness of doing one's second best. Because the film makes us privy to the power of her art, Axel's more self-effacing Babette has no need to tell us how great she is, for we see it. We see for ourselves the transformations that her feast has wrought: the faces illumined, the hearts transformed, the rancor buried, the good fellowship restored, the jubilation and the joy. Above all, this Babette is an artist who communicates with her public, however humble that public may be. She is, in a word, a culinary artist at her best. . Although we cannot actually taste Babette's feast, the film works to convey taste by proxy. In contrast with Dinesen, who details very little about the dishes themselves, no doubt wishing to avoid the pitfalls inherent in gastronomic overwriting, Axel suggests the sensuous pleasures of the gustatory through the equally sensuous enjoyment of sight and sound. The hymns that are sung throughout the film, the duet from Don Giovanni, the piano played by Philippa on different occasions—the music exercises a seduction all its own. The purity of sound draws us along just as Philippa's voice drew Papin to church. By another route, visuals bring the viewer into the universe of the film. The multiple grays, the washed-out blues of the sea and the sky, and blacks dominate the narrative until the feast bursts forth with its brilliant and dramatic colors, the general's resplendent uniform and, most of all, the meal itself: the red of the wine, the deep purple of the ripe figs, the golden pineapple, the copper utensils in the kitchen, the gleaming silver, china, and glassware on the table. It is again fitting that the film alters General Loewenhielm's conclusion, which comes as something of a benediction after his experience of grace at the feast. The realization that Dinesen gives him, that "in this world anything is possible," Axel amends simply but significantly to "in this beautiful world of ours, all things are possible." The beauty of this world here and now is to be seen and experienced by all of us. We do ourselves, and God, a disservice when we fail to take pleasure in the beauty that surrounds us. For this beauty dissolves conflict by putting us in touch with another, better world, a world that knows neither acrimony nor animosity. . Just as the meal in the film effaces the discord among the disciples, so, too, Babette's Feast uses the senses to illuminate and transcend the everyday. The film mutes the political because it takes us beyond conflict. We see not only the effects of consumption but also, and most importantly for my fable of French cuisine, the care of preparation. Babette's Feast is a food film because it follows the meal from beginning to end, from the trip to procure foodstuffs through the multiple activities of cooking and serving and the pleasures of dining. Consistent with the emphasis on the construction of beauty, the film glosses over the less appealing, destructive aspects of preparation. There is no hint of how the turtle actually ends up as soup. The closest we come to slaughter is a shot of the quail carcasses in a basket being taken to the garbage. Instead, the film focuses on preparation. The camera closes in on Babette's hands as she cuts the rounds of puff pastry dough, adds caviar and crème fra²che to the blinis, stuffs the quail with foie gras, and assembles it, with the head in place, on its pastry coffin. Walnuts are added to the endive salad, big rounds of hard cheese are cut into serving portions; the Nesselrode pudding is finished with whipped cream, glazed chestnuts, and chocolate sauce. We are almost at table level as each wine is poured into glasses that sparkle like a stained-glass window on a sunny day. . Axel's Babette's Feast shows us that cuisine is not simply the final product put on the table. The process of preparation that the film follows in loving detail makes it abundantly clear that cuisine operates within a vital web of social relations anchored by the cook. Reaching backwards in the culinary sequence to farmers and fishermen, both near and far, Babette's glorious dinner offers a striking illustration of the internationalization of food. Her insistence upon French products for a "real French dinner" makes "frenchification" the absolutely appropriate term. Then there are the men who transport the goods, the young boy who helps in the kitchen and waits on table (and, as in real life, those who clean up)—all the intermediaries who connect production and consumption. Then, and only then, do we encounter the diners at the far end of the culinary chain. Even though Babette remains out of sight in the kitchen, emerging to begin clearing the table only after the guests have departed, the camera cutting back and forth between kitchen and table calls attention to the connections between cook and consumer. The conversations that Babette overhears from the kitchen tell her that the meal is working its magic. Ultimately, the dramas of cooking frame the drama of dining: the end lies in the beginning just as the beginning implies the end. The theological reverberation of this statement is, of course, especially appropriate for a film that makes so much of beginnings and endings. III. By any criterion, Babette's Feast is a food film. More than that, it is a French food film, a film of French food, "a real French dinner" presented in amorous particulars. Still more than that, this is a French food film by virtue of the eating order that it represents and proposes for our delight, and that eating order is unequivocally French. Like Proust's Recherche, Babette's Feastresurrects a country that is no more, the France before 1870 that had already disappeared when Babette arrived in Jutland in 1871, was even more obscure when the tale was written in 1952, and had become positively prehistoric by 1987, when the film appeared. Culinary France is an ideal, and France is an idealized country that lives through its cuisine. Babette's Feast constructs something of a legend out of French cuisine, a narrative lived between history and myth, in that such cuisine restores the community of the faithful and resurrects a country. . The very distance of the film from France, its foreign author and filmmaker, language and setting, heightens our awareness of the constructed nature of the country that is culinary France. A glorious banquet allows Babette to give of her very best in her exile from France. It allows her to realize her artistic gift, and to make her public supremely, ineffably happy in a joy that seamlessly merges the spiritual and the corporeal. It also permits her to recall the country that she will never see again. The very names of the foods bring forth the land and its culinary art. From the wines, whose quality is guaranteed by a very particular wine seller in Paris (Chez Philippe, rue Montorgueil), to the quail, these foodstuffs are as talismanic as Proust's madeleine and as memorable. The gesture of reconstruction goes back in literature at least to Virgil's Andromache, Hector's widow whom Odysseus finds in a Trojan landscape that she has constructed in the Greece that holds her captive. Similarly, Babette conjures up the France that she knew and loved, the Paris of the Cafï Anglais whose patrons acclaimed her as "the greatest culinary genius." Her exile is all the more poignant because, like Andromache, she cannot go home again. As she tells the sisters, the France that she knew is no more. She brought it into existence once again if only for a moment—the utopian moment of her feast based on the stunning good fortune of winning the lottery. . As the madeleine dipped in a cup of tea gives inexpressible joy to Proust's narrator by resurrecting his childhood, so Babette's feast carries her and her guests to another, better world. We who watch this feast may also count ourselves among Babette's guests. It is not so much a lost France that the film offers the contemporary viewer as an idealized France that is called into existence by its cuisine. Babette is every French cook and every French chef, the vital link in the culinary chain that metamorphoses the raw to the cooked and the cooked to the miraculously pleasurable. The fable of French cuisine turns out to be a culinary tale for all times and places, for all those cooks who transform eating into dining, and for all those diners who come away from the table transformed."

Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 187-201 of Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2004 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine ©2004, 272 pages, 10 halftones, 11 line drawings Cloth $25.00 ISBN: 978-0-226-24323-8 Paper $22.50 ISBN: 978-0-226-24324-5 For information on purchasing the book—from bookstores or here online—please go to the webpage for Accounting for Taste. .   Pic, above, here.