Big vegetable, queen of apples and wild herbs: The secrets of 1001 floral and fruity expressions

The sparkling garden of the French language

The thousand or so expressions collected in this book all have a story. Enigmatic origins, wild shortcuts, diverted meanings, the words of the garden and the orchard are overflowing with color and energy.

From the Garden of Eden to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, from the Alhambra in Granada to the French parks, from the golden apple of the Garden of the Hesperides to the roses of Isfahan, gardens have inspired poets and nourished our dreams. From their flowers and fruits have been born proverbs, aphorisms, sayings, adages and maxims. We read them in novels, we hear them on the street corner, we hum them in songs.

Poetic, scabrous, cruel, ironic or tender, the expressions noted here are a thousand years old, a thousand days old, a thousand hours old… They have the bright colours of youth or the patina of time. They are our history, the history of a very old way of speaking and a very young language and they carry us away in the whirlwind of life.

Françoise Guerard takes us from era to era by deciphering expressions inspired by plants in the garden and orchard, fields and paths, woods and moors. A true ode to linguistic poetry.