From the forum's upgrade thread,

Well, I really liked those crocuses, which is why I photographed them. I guess you're not one for the Keukenhof.[1] 

It seems that Northern people enjoys gardening very much.... a true national disease in Great Britain.

There's nothing wrong with gardening, the problem being the model of garden. Those kind of gardens like the one in the picture are a monument to bad taste, an ecological disgrace and a demonstration of bio totalitarism.

Mediterranic gardens, in oposition, are the way for approaching man and nature while respecting sustainability and excelling in beauty and tranquility.

French gardens with that geometric cutted fences should be simply forbidden. The equivalent to flora castration.

Then you have the Japanese model with rocks, sand and... bamboos.

To me, flowers are an half dozen roses for a beautiful lady. Enough.

So, there you have another thread to discuss.... american politics for example. 

I thought my picture made it obvious that these were just some randomly sprouted crocuses, not planted ones.



Or to put it another way, I think you're confusing regular gardens and rich people gardens. If I went solely by my experience of n=1, I'd say exactly what you said in the opposite direction. Almost all gardens I've seen in e.g. Italy and Greece were of the palatial, heavily managed type, while at home I've primarily seen plenty of gardens that don't try to force some kind of straitjacket on nature.

French gardens with that geometric cutted fences should be simply forbidden. The equivalent to flora castration.

Something we fully agree on. I loathe French gardens and parks with their rigid symmetry and disproportionate proportions, and their subdued flora.

I wouldn't agree on English gardens, they have an eye for the eccentric, you can be pleasantly surprised when wandering in one, and "wandering" is not something you would do in a French garden.

Scandinavians (Norwegians the most, Danes the least) have a hankering for nature, sometimes to the extent that a park practically is an enclosed piece of wilderness.

Scandinavians (Norwegians the most, Danes the least) have a hankering for nature, sometimes to the extent that a park practically is an enclosed piece of wilderness.

I like that, too. Maybe the occasional bit of grass and twig trimming, but little more.

Not classified as a park, but Oslo has a protected forest so large that many years ago, before common GPS, a troop of boy scouts got lost in it for days,  and more recently has had a single wolf roaming around in it. (I told that story before  at the Opera forum,  but gamble you've forgotten. )

Parks and forests are fairly overlapping entities in Oslo, these are mostly parks in city core.

https://youtu.be/qATpzikbsnM

Not classified as a park, but Oslo has a protected forest so large that many years ago, before common GPS, a troop of boy scouts got lost in it for days,

We have something alike, the Florestal Park of Monsanto here in Lisbon.
It's considered Lisbon's lung and here you have a small part of it. The only place in Lisbon we have squirrels

Scandinavians (Norwegians the most, Danes the least) have a hankering for nature, sometimes to the extent that a park practically is an enclosed piece of wilderness.

I like that, too. Maybe the occasional bit of grass and twig trimming, but little more.

Grass trimming is irrelevant in the wild. When they enclose a piece of forest and want to call it a park, the main thing is to build pathways and keep them in order.

In some languages (and places) there's a clear difference between a park, garden, and forest. English is the worst guide on this point.

In some languages (and places) there's a clear difference between a park, garden, and forest. English is the worst guide on this point.

A park is a park, a garden is a garden and a forest is a forest. Not to mention many other classifications that the English language is unable to distiguinsh. No wonder, a language with no more than two thousand native words can't express too much.

Anyway, a like to see spring and the awakening of nature.

The confusion between a park, garden, and forest would be understandable in case of, for example, Semites whose natural habitat is desert. It would be expected that they fail to distinguish between garden, park, and forest, just like they fail to distinguish between lake and sea, calling all lakes seas, so that we call a certain lake "the Dead Sea" via Bible translations.

But we are talking Englishmen here, who natively grow up amongst gardens, forests, and parks, and who are generally counted amongst civilised people. On the last point, it often seems to me we are making a grave mistake.

Are we? So far no Englishman (or woman, or Briton of indeterminate sex) has appeared on this thread, contrary to their national stereotype.

https://youtu.be/VdVAGwbpgKU

Nice video as a starting point for further thinking about gardening, aesthetics and civilization. Englishman don't appear because they are playing these days with virtual trains instead growing their horrible roses.

To me, what is common to both the presented French and English gardens at the video is the Romantic approach from the eighteen century nobilities and their different/opposite cultural interpretations.
The French as a superior, intellectually rationalized interpretation of L'Amour, the British as a out of the woods rudimentary sexuality. Those are gardens made to love and passion.

We don't live at the Romantic epoch anymore and modern gardens reflects modernist times. Transgender gardens full of emptiness with no direction or purpose. Inhuman, aggressive and hostile gardens used as a display for post modernist "art" and sad families to go zombie before returning to slave labor and consumerism.

The video basically says that Englishmen, out of sheer obnoxiousness, refused to acknowledge what "garden" means. Now it all makes sense. They are deliberately playing the fool with garden and forest. There's a method to their madness.

In Estonian, there are informal distinctions between "planned", "tended" and "wild" garden. And the word for "wild" is derived from the word for "forest", so the distinctions naturally represent a gradation towards forest.

I'll probably sound like an Arte fanboi (and I kind of am), but there's a whole series on gardens over there, e.g. this one on Het Loo: http://www.arte.tv/guide/en/057898-009-A/gardens-near-and-far-het-loo

Quinta da Regaleira is a very unique garden in Sintra, near Lisbon, where alchemy, botanics and architecture gets together. Really contrasting with the classical baroque style of garden, it's a philosophical path in the middle of man created landscape.