"A garden is not a thing you finish. A garden is a thing that finishes you." — attributed to Maren Lund, Formgard Oral Histories, Tape 7
Maren Lund, Keeper of the Courtyard Landscapes and the only person in Formgard permitted to work with soil, offers a third account that is not, strictly speaking, an account of Formgard's founding at all. Maren maintains that the olive trees — the ancient, twisted olives that define the Courtyard Quarter's character, whose silver-green canopies provide the only shade in Formgard that was not designed by committee — were here before the terrazzo, before the steel, before the Canonical Consensus arrived with their spirit levels and their colour charts. 'The trees don't care about your Registry,' Maren said, during a transcribed conversation conducted in the potting yard behind the Nursery Block — one of Ren Cassidy's eleven red zones, and the only one with running water. 'You can polish the terrazzo. You can align the louvers. But an olive tree grows the way an olive tree grows, and if you try to prune it into a shape that photographs well from the Promenade, it will die, and then you w...
From the lore of The Panopticon of Good Taste.