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exposure by : Georges Lévêque .
Gilles Clément is a hard man to pin down . Best known as the designer of original public parks in France and garden from Chile to New Caledonia , he also writes popular fables , novels and philosophical reflections . He is an outspoken ecologist , botanist and entomologist who discover the butterflyBunoeopsis clementiiin 1974 in Cameroon . Clément has always been a leader rather than a follower of fashion . In the former seventies , having just graduate with degrees in both agronomy and landscape design , he was already fight down “ biological horticulture , ” an former variation of today ’s “ work with , not against nature ” composition . He champions a “ humanist environmental science ” — not the Romantic cultism of nature unspoiled by man , but partnership . Now a professor at the prestigious Versailles National School of Landscape Architecture , he is its only lector to teach instinctive history as well as design concepts . Young adorer grow out in horde to hear him remonstrate all over France and would make him into a guru , were he not humorous and unassuming . Not unlike other masters of the professing , he himself prefers to be call , plainly , a nurseryman .
Life - changing import : As a teen , helping his father spray pink wine with a extremely toxic chemical , he got some in an open cut of meat and expend two days in a coma . Soon after , Clément escaped his sire ’s extremely regimented garden in the attractively wooded Creuse field south of Paris to canvas nature in a nearby vale , and in 1977 , he was able to corrupt the farming in Creuse where he had try refuge when he was immature . He built a stone sign of the zodiac there with his own hand and transform the clearing into one of France ’s most admired garden , now called La Vallée . It is still a bema for himself , category , friends and other fauna .
At La Vallée , Clément first try out with the “ Moving Garden ” ( le jardin en mouvement ) , influential as of 1985 . desert cultivated land , left to its own devices , gradually evolves toward forest ontogenesis . For Clément , the gardener ’s intervention is not only admissible , it is central . He observes : “ Watching waste , I am not only fascinated by the energy of nature ’s renewal , I also want to get it on how to tuck myself in the midst of this powerful flow . ” He chooses the moment when unwritten growing involves all the elements usually found in a garden : trees , shrubs , vines , bulbs , tell on — even wild rose . The nurseryman ’s role then is to guide and enrich in understanding with natural process , integrate accident like fall Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree . Clément uses no chemicals , no supplemental watering and no noisy , vitality - waste machinery . But he does prune : A ego - sow willow is bring down to show off its multiple trunks ; wild hornbeams are clipped into suave dome ; a path uphill wind through the heart of a straggle smokebush ( Cotinus obovatus ) . Most path are simply mow grass , their routing changing from year to year to save ego - sown clumps of foxglove , verbascum or Heracleum sphondylium , which take out many interesting insects . “ A garden is always artificial , ” he insist , “ but home garden can become wildlife preserves . ”
Movement , as he see it , involves seasonal variation and change due to self - sowing and species migration . Moving gardens , dwell in or visited , are never purely visual but very tactile — you kneel , lie down , rub against , smell , inhale . “ My gardens are mean to be brushed against , ” writes Clément . His first book dedicate to the Moving Garden has been reprinted five times .
In the late ’ 80s and ’ 90 , Clément puzzle out on mainly public labor such as a main department of the Parc André - Citroën in Paris ( with landscape painting decorator Alain Provost and architects Patrick Berger , Jean - Francois Jodry and Jean - Paul Viguier ) , the Valloires Abbey garden ( Les Jardins de Valloires ) in Picardy , the Jardins de la Grande Arche de la Défense in Paris , the Henri Matisse Park in Lille , garden of the Chateau de Blois and the Mediterranean Gardens ( Le Jardin des Méditerranées ) of the Domaine du Rayol . His most influential work internationally has perhaps been his part of the Parc André - Citroën . It includes a Moving Garden managed by the park staff : It is they who determine where the paths will be mown from yr to year , to observe ego - sown plants . Nearby , his color - theme gardens have a complex symbolism , which visitor might feel even if uninformed . Mothers report that when they insert the Green Garden , linked to the theme of quiet , their tyke often stop verbalize .
In 1997 , Piet Oudolf , Henk Gerritsen and Michael King point out on these garden ( inNieuwe bloemen , nieuwe tuinen ): “ Gilles Clément ’s triumph at Parc André - Citroën demonstrates the mountain chain of possibilities the art of gardening offers for both ego - expression and communicating . He has shown how idea may be presented both on the wondrous scale and in the tiniest point , cause his approach as relevant to the secret gardener as it should be to the broader creation of the landscape painting architect . ”
Clément refuses the romanticist idea of an creative person ’s signature , but his public task have common elements : He often connect separate spaces — officially , as at Citroën or informally , like clearings in a forest — each with its own character . Connecting paths are meandering and multidirectional . Where he include a individual long axis vertebra ( at Le Grande Arche de la Défense in the Domaine du Rayol ) , it never dominates in the sense of enforce a pecking order and reveals little of the closed book on either side , well access from the recollective bloodline but invisible until you find right upon it . He sometimes uses geometric shapes , peculiarly around historic monuments or where symbolization is suggested , but this formality is open - ended , almost subversive in its capriciousness . His rejection of hierarchy , in garden design as in life , is almost obsessional . For several years running , Clément refuse the French national plunder for landscape architecture , insist it should be return to the anon. farmers , engineers and foresters who are the actual architects of the landscape painting . In 1999 , the booty was bestowed on him without his consent .
Clément calls the Moving Garden a conceptual tool . His 2nd one , the Planetary Garden , emerged after he had see the first photo of Earth from blank space . He imagined extending the confines — and attention — lavished on home gardens to the whole earth . In 2000 , Clément directed a major science exhibit in Paris to explain and leave positive examples of this theme . He also took a position on species migration similar to that of American writer Michael Pollan , which has not always made him popular in the scientific residential district . “ The principal objective , ” write Clément , “ is to encourage biological diversity , a generator of wonder and our warrant for the future . ”
For the past few years , Clément has been developing another concept , which he call “ landscapes of the Third Kind . ” A study of highly managed farm and forest farming to the south of Paris led him to look for out hidden spaces that escape monoculture and are bury by human industry , in - between spaces often abandoned after abuse , still capable of ad-lib revival . He has always had fellow feeling for marginal and neglected spaces — as La Vallée once was . His attempts at mix such exemption into municipal intention have proved controversial .
Clément continues to publish , consult and create worldwide . You never quite know where or when . Constant however is his religion in the garden : “ tangible terrain , mystic but explorable , it invites the gardener to define its space , its wealth , its home ground . It carry humankind suspended in metre . Each seed announces tomorrow . It is always a projection . The garden produce goods , deliver symbols , accompanies dreams . It is approachable to everyone . It promises nothing and impart everything . ”
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