Michael Pollan on the storm of Versailles

 

The Royal Way or  Great Lawn of Versailles. Photo from http://en.chateauversailles.fr/discover/estate/gardens/walks#the-royal-way-or-great-lawn

I have read a couple of books by professor journalist Michael Pollan. The Botany of Desire is my favorite so far. It has interesting stories about trees and plants, but most important, he makes us reflect on certain environmental aspects. 

In the chapter "The Potato" (pages184-185 of the 2001 edition), he mentions the 1999 storm that severely damaged the gardens of Versailles and wonders if maybe a wilder design would have been better in order to speed up the restoration. 

The park devastated in December 1999. Photo from http://www.versailles3d.com/en/over-the-centuries/xxe/1999.html

The park devastated in December 1999. Photo from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/580176.stm

The park devastated in December 1999. Photo from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/581056.stm

Being so close to another anniversary of the event, let's read about it: "During the night of 25 to 26 December 1999, winds of 210 km/h blasted through Versailles for two hours. The morning of the 26th revealed scenes of devastation. Several dozens of windows in the Palace had been broken and various roofs had been blown off. But it was the park which had suffered the most. More than 10,000 of the 200,000 trees had been affected, having either been split or uprooted. All the avenues had suffered and some were even inaccessible. Among the damaged trees were 80 percent of the estate’s rare species, which had been destroyed, including several historic specimens such as the two tulip trees planted by Marie-Antoinette in 1783 in Trianon and the Corsican pine planted by Napoleon."

Source: http://en.chateauversailles.fr/discover/history/key-dates/storm-versailles-1999

A similar event had occurred on a lesser scale in 1990. No replanting had been carried out since SXIX and the two storms brought up the great deterioration of the plants. And so, the restoration began. 

Gardens of Versailles. Photo from http://www.chateauversailles.fr/decouvrir/domaine/jardins

Lake of the Swiss guard. Photo by Thomas Garnier. From http://en.chateauversailles.fr/discover/estate/park

This is Michael Pollan's reflection on the perfect geometry and man´s pride:

"In 1999 a freak December windstorm (...) laid waste to many of Andre Lenótre's centuries old plantings at Versailles, crumpling in a matter of seconds that garden's perfect geometries - perhaps as potent an image of human mastery as we have. When I saw the pictures of the wrecked allées, the straight lines scrabbled, the painterly perspectives ruined, it occurred to me that a less emphatically ordered garden would have been better able to withstand the storm's fury and repair itself afterward. So what are we to make of such a disaster? It all depends: on whether one regards that particular storm as a straight forward proof of our hubris and nature's infinitely superior power or, as some scientists now do, as an effect of global warming, which is adding to the atmosphere's instability. (....)

Ironies of this kind are second nature to the gardener, who eventually learns that every advance in his control of the garden is also an invitation to a new disorder. Wilderness might be reducible, acre by acre, but wildness is something else again. So the freshly hoed earth invites a new crop of weeds, the potent new pesticide engenders resistance in pests, and every new step in the direction of simplification -toward monoculture, say, or genetically identical plants- leads to unimagined new complexities." 

In support of Pollan´s words, I´ve found this article from The Guardian, 2000:

The following is an excerpt from Le Catastrophe:

"Still struggling to clear up from violent storms that killed 90 people and an oil spill that has covered 250 miles of its Atlantic beaches in stinking tar, battered France is beginning to realise the full extent of the damage. 

 The total bill from two nights of 100mph-plus gales that ravaged the country between Christmas and the new year could run to an astronomical £7.5 billion, according to estimates from industry, government agencies and insurance companies. 

The storms - described by the Interior Minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, as 'a catastrophe on a scale probably without precedent in post-war France' - caused massive damage to buildings, businesses and agriculture, as well as leaving eight million people without electricity for up to a week.

 Most visible, however, is the environmental damage. The French landscape has changed, particularly in the most devastated areas of the East and the South-west. The forests are ruined: between 260 million and 300 million trees have been destroyed - compared with 15 million in Britain in the gales of 1987.

 It will take up to two centuries to restore France's forests to their former glory, according to the National Forestry Office. 'All kinds of trees have been affected - century-old oaks are knocked over, young pines are broken, beeches, maples are hit,' said the office's secretary general, Jacques Descargues. 'In areas where all the trees have fallen to the ground we will have to recreate the entire forest, which means that in certain cases it will take 100 to 200 years. It's an enormous job."