Fontenelle examines a drawing beside a pale cave formation.

A garden made of young marble

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757), a French writer and secretary of the Paris Academy of Sciences, recounts a visit to the cave of Antiparos in his tribute to the botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort. Fontenelle depended here on the traveller’s account. He characterizes Tournefort’s view with a word that one would scarcely expect to meet beneath the ground. The cave takes on the appearance of a garden.

What a botanist sees underground

Monsieur de Tournefort had the keen pleasure of seeing there a new kind of garden. All its plants were different pieces of marble, still coming into being or young, which, to judge by all the circumstances of their formation, could only have grown.

– Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Éloge de M. de Tournefort, 1717, Grotte d’Antiparos.[1]

A botanist is accustomed to reading a garden through the forms of the plants that grow there. In the cave that habit can continue for a moment. Here too, shapes stand beside one another with outlines that recall growing things. Yet the material of these apparent plants belongs, in Fontenelle’s description, to the family of marbles. The eye that recognizes the likeness must also account for what it has actually found. The familiar word garden makes the place accessible while bringing out something of its strangeness.

What the comparison lets us notice

Still more surprising is the age Fontenelle gives the stones. Some are in the process of forming and others are young. A finished piece of polished marble normally reveals little about its own history. The underground garden encourages a visitor to regard each shape as a stage in a process of formation. This gives the comparison a dimension in time. As in a garden above ground, one might leave wondering what the same place will look like to a later visitor.