Mostly, these are French gardens with follies in them. These are follies surrounded by mostly French gardens. The one that looks like a ruin (Ermenonville) was built to look like a ruin in posthumous honor of a writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The only one done up in pretty colors (Portmeirion) is not in France at all, but in Northern Wales. Beneath that one, Marie Antoinette's frequently photographed toy farm at Versailles – a plaything forever surviving ironically as a monument – displays itself from an unfamiliar angle against storm clouds.
