I became interested in garden follies when I saw a neighbour constructing this charming structure in his backyard:A folly is a building constructed strictly as a decoration, having none of the usual purposes of housing or sheltering associated with a conventional structure. They originated as decorative accents in parks and estates. "Folly" is used in the sense of fun or light-heartedness, not in the sense of something ill-advised. - Wikipedia
On my most recent visit to France I got my fill of follies at Versailles where the gardens are littered with pavilions and belvederes. Marie Antoinette's Le Hameau is a little village composed of rustic garden follies that she used as a retreat when the pressure of palace life overwhelmed her.
In the gardens of the Petit Trianon, Versailles
Belvedere at the Trianon, Versailles
Le Hameau, Versailles |
| Classical colonnade at le Parc Monceau |
Bois de Vincennes
About twenty years ago Mendocino Theater Company produced a play called Tally's Folly, a love story between mismatched people: a Jewish Yankee and a local girl in a Southern town. Part of the set was something like the pictures above, where they'd meet to talk and hold hands. A line that stuck in my mind was when the man said forcefully in a New York Jewish accent, "Ya dun't deprecate a man's car!"
ReplyDeleteKristy Hotchkiss, the actress who played the Southern woman, had two kids who went to a school where I worked in the early 1980s. In the late '80s or early '90s I went to visit the boy in the hospital in Santa Rosa when he was in a coma because of a crash; he'd been in the back of a friend's pickup truck with a dozen other young people, and the driver drove the truck into a tree. Geordy;s mother stayed in the room with him for weeks, slept there and ate there and never left, and the weeks turned into months, touching him, talking to him, playing music for him, and one day he woke up, and eventually he recovered. He came to my radio show once with his girlfriend, who offered to repair my sweater, which I still have somewhere. Instead of the hole now there's a massive ball of thread going over and through and over and through itself again and again. It's like the flight recorder in an airplane; it'll be the only thing left when the whole rest of it is spread over a mountainside or eaten by moths.
Marco, I award you the best comment prize. Not for the week or month, but for all time!
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