Madeleines are everywhere in the garden

Proust wrote somewhere that the reason beautiful places sometimes disappoint us in reality is that the imagination can only lay hold of that which is absent. It traffics not in the data of our senses, but in memories and dreams and desires. A garden will move us to the extent it engages the imagination as well as the senses. Among other things, the garden is a passage somewhere else - to the personal and shared past it's scents evoke, to the distant places to which it's forms allude. Gardens exist not only in the here and now, but in the there and then too. 

Michael Pollan - Second Nature