Save the planet? Nah, interesting though. In a couture and comestibles mashup sort of way though.
From Town & Country,
Louis XIV’s kitchen garden, the Potager du Roi, is at the center of a $15 million global research initiative to study the preservation of historic gardens in the face of climate change.
Few visitors to Versailles today realize that in its heyday under Louis XIV the palace’s dazzling architectural splendors and matchless artistic treasures were often eclipsed by the products of the Potager du Roi, the Sun King’s 23-acre kitchen garden on the palace grounds.
Green peas, for instance, were in 17th-century France a delicacy, a much coveted Italian import comparable to truffles today. And thanks to the efforts of the Potager’s visionary chief gardener, Jean-Baptiste de la Quintinie, they became a highlight of Louis’s banquets and an obsession of his court.
“The craze for peas continues apace,” the Marquise de Maintenon reported in 1696. “The anticipation of eating them, the pleasure of having eaten them, the joy of eating them again: these are the three topics that have preoccupied our Princes for the past four days now… It’s a fashion, a frenzy.”
Three centuries later the Potager is again a hive of activity, and not just on the bright spring morning when T&C swooped in with enough haute couture finery to rival the court of Louis XIV. Today it is also a Center of Excellence for climate resilience, one of the pillars of a five-year, $15 million initiative quietly launched by the World Monuments Fund to study the conservation of cultural heritage sites, including historic gardens, in the face of climate change.
The WMF and the Potager du Roi have history. In the 1990s the fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy, then the president of the WMF’s French chapter, teamed up with the grande dame of American gardening, Bunny Mellon, to develop a conservation plan for the site and to restore both the central fountain and the gilded iron Grille du Roi (King’s Gate), Louis XIV’s private entrance to the garden.
This project culminated in June 1996 in a WMF gala dinner for 400 overlooking the Potager. Since then the approach to protecting this important heritage site has changed, says the WMF’s CEO and president, Bénédicte de Montlaur, and “the Potager is the perfect illustration of the evolution of our work and of preservation in general.”
In some ways the project returns the Potager to its roots as an epicenter of horticultural innovation. La Quintinie and his successors (after his death in 1688) devised inventive new planting and pruning methods and experimented with light and wind exposure, soil amendment, and moisture and temperature control. By creating special microclimates, they were able to harvest much of nature’s bounty out of season: asparagus in December, lettuce in January, strawberries in March, cucumbers in April, and figs in mid-June....
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