Gaia’s
Gift
Garden Education and Tourism
Who
As the mythological earth mother, Gaia was responsible for
the gifts of sustenance and beauty that we find in our gardens. Our mission is to offer products and
services that let us use and enjoy these gifts in ways that also replenish
the earth.
Garden Education and Tourism,
products and services, are not only fun and entertaining but they allow us
to share with others an understanding of different cultures. They allow us to learn how other people
view the joys and challenges of producing food and beauty in a world of
political and economic upheaval. We
use gardens to study our connection to each other and the past, in order to
help create a better future.
|
.
Contributors: bio and other information
Esther Czekalski, Gaias
Gift, Owner
Stéphanie de Courtois, ENSP, Program Director
Véronique Sidoli, ENSP, Class
Administrator
Michel Baridon, ENSP, Lecturer and Guide
Antoine
Jacobsohn, ENSP, Lecturer and Guide
Philippe Schuller, ENSP, Lecturer and Guide
Esther
Czekalski, Gaias Gift, Owner
Esther was born on a truck
farm. Her first business experience
was handling cash at the family’s weekend fruit and vegetable stand outside
of Detroit, Michigan. She much preferred this to working in the
fields.
She completed her MBA at Seidman
School of Business, Grand Valley State Colleges, with honors, in the late
1970s.
In her first house, around that
time, she remembered the taste of tomatoes, fresh from the garden and
started growing them from seed, the way that her father did. A few herbs, some lettuces and a few
roses around the border of her small garden beds and she was hooked. This was time of rapid change in the seed
catalog business. Catalogs like
Shepherds and Cooks not only offered not only seeds but new cultural
experiences. The catalogs were like
small books, treasured for their pictures, recipes and instruction about
new vegetables, brought home from around the world. No longer just for farmers, seed catalogs
were a doorway to exciting new worlds of back yard treasure.
Working for a PC manufacturer,
she found the “gardens” e-mail listserv.
Respected for her shared knowledge and experience, she has gained an
extensive education from over 15 years of participation in the list. The purchase of her employer by a French
computer manufacturer over 10 years ago allowed her to intensify her garden
studies with regular trips to Europe and many, well researched, visits to
gardens in France.
She brings an avid love of
gardens and of learning about people, history and culture.
Born in 1972, Stéphanie de Courtois is a Garden
Historian and a Teacher for the ENSP.
Since 1996 she has been responsible for the
conservation of the historic Potager du Roi, the Kings garden in Versailles, dedicated to the
research and development of fruits and vegetables.
In addition, she has been in charge of research
on the history of gardens for the school.
An accomplished writer, she co-edited and contributed to the
definitive book on the life and career of Edouard André, a 19th Century
landscape architect who designed and influenced the design of gardens
throughout the world. Since then she
has coordinated various editorial projects, including a compilation of
writings under the direction of Michel Racine: Créateurs
de jardins et de paysages de la renaissance à nos jours. This comprehensive, two volume work
describes the people and philosophies that created the historic and
beautiful gardens of France.
Landscape Architect; Véronique is responsible
for continuing education courses in Versailles.
Continue
|
Contributors,
continued
Michel Baridon, ENSP
Lecturer and Guide web
page
Michel Baridon, Professor Emeritus at the University of Bourgogne. Historian of Gardens and Culture, he is
particularly interested by the relationship between ideas and design. He has published four books, winning a
prize from French Television in 1999 for his book: Les
Jardins. Paysagistes, jardiniers, poètes, Robert Laffont (Paris, 1998). His last book is on the gardens of Versailles; it was also
translated into Italian. In addition
he has written and many, many articles on how culture and history are
expressed through the design of gardens.
After studying agronomy (Soil and Crop Culture)
at Cornell University, Antoine Jacobsohn
continued his studies in France with Jean-Louis
Flandrin at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences
(l'Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales). He is a specialist
in the history of food, horticulture and he is an ethnographic (cultural
anthropology) researcher. His last publication is an anthology work
on the Good Gardeners: dissertations on French gardening from the 16th to
the 19th century. "Anthologie des bons
jardiniers : traites de jardinage francais du 16e au debut du 19e
siecle" (Flammarion, 2003).
Philippe Schuller, ENSP
Lecturer and Guide
Society’s web page
Philippe brings a different perspective to our
studies with a background in the Arts, Theatre and the production of public
spectacles. In the 80s, he studied the visual arts, both beaux arts and
applied. He used this to develop
stage sets and special effects for the theatre, movies, the dance and even
for pubs.
In 1996
he studied animated spectacles and today he is Administrative Director for the
Technical Department of La Villette park and the center that handles
spectacles in Paris.
When he
and his wife bought their home in Montreuil, in 1998, he became interested
in the ancient practices of agriculture that were practiced there. One of his ideas was to revive the
traditional art of marking apples.
Records show that apples were marked with meaningful decorations for
special events, like aniversaries, coronations and birthdays. The city of Montreuil helped revive this
art form with an exceptional subsidy to the Horticultural
Society of Montreuil (Société d'horticulture de Montreuil).
In 2002, Philippe
became the Secretary General of that venerable Society and it’s continued
to grow under his influence. Since
that time, the Society’s bulletin, published three times a year, has taken
a new form, devoted for the most part to the history of Montreuil. Once a month the Society’s museum is open
for free.
|
All rights
reserved. ©Gaias-Gift 2003
All
rights reserved. ©Gaias-Gift 2003