Favoring the Living over Form

The legacy of destruction

Your practice as a landscaper-gardener has led you to develop the concept of “Garden in movement,” that has signaled an evolution in the formal conception of the garden and man’s relationship with nature and the living. Could you explain the genesis of this laisser-faire philosophy to us?

Gardening places us in a permanent relationship with living beings that establish interactions which are essential to maintaining their balance and that do not require the intervention of man. When I was a horticultural student, we were taught mainly about the act of killing: we learnt to cultivate an “interesting” plant and kill all of the other plants, which were de facto considered as “useless” or “inconvenient.” These murderous gestures signaled the beginning of the reorganization and the sterilization of the soil, this extraordinary “machine” that is essential to the establishment of life on the surface. The illusion of mastery has driven us into the bottomless well of ignorance. Nowadays a farmer is unaware of his or her surroundings and the complexity of the systems that govern his or her land. Rather than working intelligently with the principles of nature, it continues to be enough for the farmer to dictate and kill.

Your practice as a landscaper-gardener has led you to develop the concept of “Garden in movement,” that has signaled an evolution in the formal conception of the garden and man’s relationship with nature and the living. Could you explain the genesis of this laisser-faire philosophy to us?

Gardening places us in a permanent relationship with living beings that establish interactions which are essential to maintaining their balance and that do not require the intervention of man. When I was a horticultural student, we were taught mainly about the act of killing: we learnt to cultivate an “interesting” plant and kill all of the other plants, which were de facto considered as “useless” or “inconvenient.” These murderous gestures signaled the beginning of the reorganization and the sterilization of the soil, this extraordinary “machine” that is essential to the establishment of life on the surface. The illusion of mastery has driven us into the bottomless well of ignorance. Nowadays a farmer is unaware of his or her surroundings and the complexity of the systems that govern his or her land. Rather than working intelligently with the principles of nature, it continues to be enough for the farmer to dictate and kill.

The Garden in Movement

The Garden in Movement is a gardening method that favors the living over form. This does not mean that there is an absence of form, but rather that it emerges through gardening, over time, and it changes depending on what the gardener deems important to conserve or to remove. It is not completely laisser-faire but rather a series of minor interventions, in such a way as to work as much as possible with—and as little as possible against—nature. The gardener works on this in an opposing economy of energy, avoiding destruction under the pretext of “cleaning up”! When a plant begins to grow in the middle of a path, it is legitimate to ask the question of whether to modify its route rather than just removing it. All of the plants that settle spontaneously in a garden are worthy of consideration; there are no “weeds.” Formal work comes second then in my approach to space. Most plants choose their own place, they are travelers and wanderers—on the scale of the garden as on the scale of the planet—carried by winds, currents, the pelts of animals, birds, and the soles of feet.

The plants that we are most familiar with, which seem to have always been at our sides, were only introduced very recently. The oaks from druid culture have not been here for eternity for example; they came up from the Iberian peninsula via stolen acorns that were discarded here and there by jays. The coconut, the largest seed in the world, floats. It has expanded its territory, carried along by various currents, but we don’t know exactly where it first appeared. Planetary cross-fertilization is one of evolution’s mechanisms. “Indigenous” and “invasive,” are terms that have no meaning. These cultural considerations don’t take into account the ecosystem as it has functioned since the appearance of life on Earth, regulated by movements and migrations.

Once we take a step back in time and space, we understand that the term “invasive species” is overused. These rapidly developing beings settle as pioneers and their spectacular growth gives the impression that they are colonizing space, but the “environmental response” always finishes by reestablishing balance when it comes to the presence of different species. It is what we call an emerging ecosystem. When the climate changes, as is currently the case for various reasons, it is normal that the geographical distribution of species also changes. Plants that in the past couldn’t develop in certain geographical zones now can, and vice versa. Migrations, essential to survival, are part of the mechanism of evolution.

From its origins, the garden has been a closed space where man cultivates that which he has brought back from elsewhere, that which he has sought out further and further afield accompanied by the progress of technology. The potato, the tomato, the zucchini, or the eggplant—that make up our daily diet—are exotic species. The planet also hosts a self-contained biodiversity that represents our condition of sharing. It behaves like a giant washing machine that recycles all of the elements, in such a way that the water that I am drinking has already been drunk by a number of other beings before it reaches me. This is why it is fundamental to ask oneself how to put the energy that has been taken out of the environment back into it, or how not to pollute the water irreversibly. It is an enormous management project and a political program in itself!

By taking the measure of spatial finitude, planetary cross-fertilization, and the omnipresence of man—who has an impact even where he is not to be found—I have come to the idea of the Planetary Garden. It supposes that each citizen of the planet is a gardener, including mankind in the system of Gaia, something that Lovelock did not necessarily have in mind.

The Third (estate) Landscape: a biodiversity reserve

So the gardener is no longer there to “domesticate”, “tame”, “dictate”, or struggle with”, but rather to “accompany”, “drive”, and “manage” the living. He is not rejected from the “ideal garden” but occupies its center. So why have you made the Île Derborence—a small hill in the center of the Henri-Matisse park in Lille—inaccessible?

The Henri-Matisse park is situated on the edges of the fortifications of the old town, on a former industrial site. It can be accessed via the Roubaix gate, or from the TGV train station, for which the debris from the excavation work was stored on site. In this pile of rubble, there were Vauban bricks, probably from an ancient fortress. I really wanted to reuse this idea of the fortress to question what we have decided to protect today by offering to conserve the pile of debris, allowing nature to establish itself on its summit. Abandoning land is like handing it over to a future forest. The initial idea consisted of accelerating a process of establishing a boreal forest that is the result of a planetary cross-fertilization—like a sample of a future climactic vegetation—but the lack of a budget for planting finally led us to leave nature to develop at its own pace. Staging is a solid base for providing support to a landscape created by nature’s energy. The intention was not to prevent access, but rather to make it into a centerpiece of the theme of the Third (estate) Landscape, on a pedagogical level.

What I call a Third (estate) Landscape corresponds to a biodiversity reserve, a host territory for species that find themselves chased away from many other places. Edges of roadways, wastelands, railway embankments, urban or earthy gaps and crevasses, all of these parcels of land where man does not go, hosting a biodiversity much richer than can be found in fields, in well cared for “green spaces,” sprayed with phytosanitary products or even those of the Douglas forest, where no light penetrates. Once we have understood this, and become aware of our dependence on this diversity, we no longer look at wastelands in the same way. Instead of presenting them as a loss of power over space, an abandonment or neglect, we can on the contrary look at them as a rehabilitation of the space. I called these spaces Third (estate) Landscapes in reference to the pamphlet by the Abbe Siéyès, who at the moment of the Revolution said: “What is this Third-Estate? — Everything — What role has it played to date? — None. — What does it aspire to become? — Something.”

These spaces, are everything, and our future probably depends on them. I would not say that the Third (estate) Landscape “aspires” to become something, because it is not biodiversity which is threatened, but more-so the survival of mankind on this planet. Plants are autotrophic, they synthesize chlorophyll from the sun’s energy, while man finds himself at the end of the food chain. Life came before us, it will continue on without us and plants will cope much better than we will. But it is interesting for us to look differently at these species for our own longevity. A wasteland can be a treasure.