What's a tropical garden?

Let me introduce my beloved companion and exciting partner in life: Jacques-Emile Lecaron (link to his homepage on the right). When I started planting the garden, he was in Clamart, France (where it now snows...)

View of the garden, and beyond, the Meudon Forest

and we exchanged a few cerebral musings about gardens. This is his view of gardens: 

"The English garden is a pastoral approach. Its lawn is but an allegory of meadows; its temples and bridges are counterpoints embedded into a natural scene. Shepherd boys and shepherdesses are its divine tenders. It is anchored in the city—a patch of exotism for city dwellers who will sit and converse in one of its atmospheric edifices.  The English garden invites to reverse time and flow back to a pre-industrial Golden Age.

The garden à la française connotes nature differently. Domesticated wheatfields, croplands, bordering trees along roads, city plazas, channeled rivers are its basic material. The garden design extols urban space and life and veers its elements towards an enchanted future. Perspective lines shape the territory and suddenly reveal new vistas; the result is a public space, organized and ordely, yet supple. Sculptures associate with myths. Water features (allegories of dreams) trap the sky that they reflect. Groves balance the master plan; they are territories of love and poetry where human life bursts in between foliage, labyrinth, danse, theater, optical ambushes. The garden à la française is a dream machine, an opera. Designing such a garden is a challenge.

In Bali, beauty lies in the confrontion between sophisticated and architectured tropical flower beds and a lush and extremely diversified jungle. 
I agree with Made Wijaya, the author of "Tropical Garden design", that the tropical garden should convey a sense of outrage; it cannot be submitted to the subtleness of light, the seasonal changing of leaves color, or fragrances: it should be a substitute to the sky. Dark shadows, colorful light and exuberant foliage sweeps are expected. Flowers, fruits and foliage all add to the awakening of senses. The tropical garden is not an itinerary but a juxtaposition of selected vistas. Shadows will be overwhelming, while light is recreated in the rivalry of colors and the contemplation of water features—rivers, ponds, swimming pools.

The french and english gardens are exhilirating paths to the sky, to Paradise. One painting epitomizes this: Jean-Antoine Watteau's "Pèlerinage à l'île de Cythère" .

In the tropics, the sky is white, bright with heat and often stormy. It shelters neither paradise nor benevolent gods. Designing a garden that leads to the sky would be a misconception.

We can only try to create a paradise on earth, full of shapes and textures and colors, hoping and waiting for the gods to come and visit us. We will have to be dress up in our most beautiful attire and cook delicious meals. Perhaps the first muse to come will be "La charmeuse de serpents",  painted by the Douanier Rousseau.