Scale of the new garden.

Yep, there's a lot of differences. Some too obvious to mention. Most obviously they look different. One is a stinking great palace garden manicured, managed, loved and cultivated carefully and systematically by a huge squadron of horticulturalists, aware of the full import of their every action on the history of France and landscape architecture in the western world. The other is four square inches of weeds growing in a footpath somewhere in Brunswick (or was it Preston?) about which probably no human being would care if it's not even there anymore. Quite a lot more people would be fussed if the Versailles gardens got a damn good dose of agent orange.


Chance: the chance events of viable seeds somehow managing to land in an hospitable soil in a vast desert of cement, and the chance of history preferencing one species over another for a complex planting of human-preferred geometries.


Design next to nature makes an interesting question: does nature design? To bring it a more manageable size I'll use Bill Mollison's axiom: everything gardens. This is as true of plants as it is of us, rabbits and ring tailed possums: everything tries to modify the conditions that it finds itself in to be more amenable, more capable of meeting its needs and comfort and ensuring the continued survival of itself as an individual and a species.


To get to the point, it's probably more fair to ask what's the same?

Because I'm tempted to say there's no difference, from this point of view:
both of these gardens are a whole bunch of plants and other animals (insects, microbes...) struggling to survive in a hostile environment managed by human beings. What we describe as difference is often around how we, as aesthetically focused, historically minded cultural animals feel, how we consider what are the histories of these styles of garden, on the one hand the intensely managed royal gardens that speak of power and privilege, on the other the vertiginous survival despite the odds: the wandering suburbanite, roundup in one hand, lawn mower in the other, how much odder do you get than that?
I don't know about the French floral condition, but here we know these little plants as garden weeds. And weeds in our bush. From their point of view they are living organism doing what living things do: their best to survive in the condition in which they find themselves.


As far as the concept of garden goes, is it too big of a leap to consider these little gardens with as much fidelity to the notion of garden as the Versailles gardens, to the notion of public parks as a botanical garden, as a soccer field, a reserve, a suburban park, a regional park? As the garden in the main street? As the front yard? It's about scale.