Quotable: Gardening

According to Charles Moore in The Poetics of Gardens, the layout of paths reflects cultural characteristics.

The path of Islam are straight and narrow, leading directly into the heart of paradise.  Those of Versailles are equally single-minded but climax in the bedchamber of the Sun King.  The goose-foot patterns of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century French hunting park tell of the headlong flight of the stag, while English parks may be patterned on the winding tracks of the devious fox.  Rococo gardens cut passes into the curlicued rhythms of courtly frivolity, and Japanese gardens have, for centuries, deployed precarious stepping-stoned with such artful irregularity that the placement of each geta-constrained foot must become a conscious, exquisitely shaped act.

-- as quoted in Garden Paths:Inspiring Designs and Practical Projects by Gordon Hayward