The Gardener of Versailles: My Life in the World’s Grandest Garden

Overseeing a public garden remains a most underappreciated vocation. If the gardener-in-chief is doing his or her job, the space carries the sense that no one has been there and done anything and it is simply sacred space, destined for the magical transport of people who stroll there. Baraton’s fascinating memoir corrects this misreading with an intimate and visceral look into his complicated relationship with one of Europe’s most astonishing public gardens, Versailles, which dates to the 17th century. He writes of a particularly haunting snowy evening when he saw through a window the apparition of a sobbing woman. He left the warmth of his home to go search for her in the gardens. “I thought of all the desperate depressed women who had gotten through the garden gates in the night and whose husbands called rescuers to help find them.” It is a telling glimpse of the challenge, consolation, and occasional horror of overseeing a place of magic. (Feb. 11)