The Garden as Status
Gardens have long been status symbols. The garden at Versailles that André Le Nôtre (see pages 26–33) designed for Louis XIV was part of the Ancien Régime stage play of wealth and power. The point of this kind of over-the-top status symbol is to wow people so that they understand that is is desirable to submit. The good news for us as garden lovers is that status-symbol gardens often start as a declaration of status and change into something like a living museum, sometimes, but not always, following a revolution.
In more recent times, wealth and power have become decoupled from public office at least to some degree. Public office holders can be thought of as designees of wealthy families, such as the Rockefellers and DuPonts. ...
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