Landscape architecture

The eighth entry is la liste des végétaux, and the noun that closes it is the one an English reader is likeliest to mistranslate without noticing anything wrong. « Vegetable » has narrowed in English almost entirely to food: the things on a greengrocer’s shelf, the second course on a plate, and beyond that only a few set phrases such as « vegetable oil » or « vegetable matter ». Le végétal did no such narrowing. It stayed in botany, where it names the plant kingdom as against the animal and the mineral one, so les végétaux are simply plants: trees, shrubs, grasses, every living thing specified for the site. What goes into a soup is un légume, a word with no connection to it whatever. La liste des végétaux is therefore the plant schedule, the document naming each species and the size it must have when it arrives, and reading it as a list of vegetables turns a landscape contract into a kitchen garden. The same trap sits in the neighbouring entries, because les surfaces végétalisées are planted surfaces and nobody is growing carrots on them.