Gardens and motorways represent inherently different ways of perceiving the landscape: while the motorway is a purely visual experience, seen through the windshield, distanced from the perceiver in his climatized cocoon, the small, tactile scale of a garden allows for a multisensory experience. With motorways getting more and more separated from their landscapes, can a garden be the opportune resource to address the motorway landscape? A place that appears to be doing this, is the Garden of Birds, a small circular space as the pivot point of a rest area along the A837 motorway in southwestern France. Fifteen years after implementation it now appears more like a garden than might have ever been intended, providing a sensory landscape experience. Drawing and describing this situation-including its intentional and unintentional changes resulting from manmade and natural interventions and processes-as if it were a designed composition, exposes a spatial elaboration that facilitates the multisensory perception of landscape. The garden experience entices the motorist to look at the surrounding landscape with fresh eyes. keywords experience of landscape, gardens, motorway, Bernard Lassus, afterlife of gardens The Garden of Birds does not exist; there is no sign along the road pointing towards a place with that name. Yet there is this small circular place, enclosed by a vine-covered arcade, nested in a small forest along the motorway A837-the Autoroute des Oiseaux-in southwestern France (Fig. 1). This pivot point of the Aire des Oiseaux [rest area of birds] has all the attributes of a garden: a formal spatial definition, a reference to nature, an expression of landscape, a representation of garden culture. So, for the purpose of investigation, let us call this specific place the Garden of Birds. I discovered this 'garden' by coincidence, having set out to investigate its better-known counterparts, two similar circular spaces in the Aire de Crazannes, the rest area dedicated to the dramatic experience of the adjoining Crazannes Quarries. But where the quarries are an intense experience, the adjoining rest area and its gardens appear lean and empty. The Garden of Birds on the other hand, turned out to be rich in landscape experiences.
