2011 edition - Gardens of the future or the art of happy biodiversity

16. Lucy in the sky

published at 07/11/2017

"Lucy in the sky", Festival des Jardins 2011 - © E. Sander

This garden transports us to the city, onto the roof of a tower and highlights all the possibilities of an urban soilless garden.

How could we not be fascinated by these plants, which grew on the earth more than 100 million years ago and which, in order to survive in a hostile environment, evolved, leaving their earth-bound condition and attaining that of epiphytes? And how could we not be grateful to Lucy for finally coming down out of her Eritrean tree, 99 million years later?

Nowadays, bees can no longer sustain their life as honest agricultural workers gathering pollen and they are dying as they skim low over the countryside, under the combined effect of insecticides applied to sunflowers, maize and fruit trees. Half of them do however survive; we are told that those which have come into the urban environment are prospering in hives that have been set up for them on the roofs of our cities.

People are also taking refuge in cities to find resources there, which their countryside can no longer give them. However, their gardens struggle to find a place in the sun. So, they need to adapt, like the epiphytes, by moving up high. The garden of the future is on top of the city. It contemplates it and, beyond that, contemplates its huge landscape. If it is uprooted, it adapts and takes its resources from technology: soilless cultivation, range of epiphytes, hydroponics, plant carpets, solar energy, fogging, etc.

Thus, one of the greatest discoveries of biodiversity so far is really still today the richness of the canopy, the soilless garden on the roof of primary forests. After pharmacopoeia, gardens will take an interest in this vast world of city rooftops. Plants will colonise the city and take nourishment from its water, its air and its waste. As for gardeners, they will be there to orchestrate this symbiosis within the ecumene and appreciate the diversity of its beneficial effects.

DESIGNERS

Chilpéric DE BOISCUILLÉ, architect, Raphaëlle CHÉRÉ and Pauline SZWED, landscape engineers from the National Higher Institute for Nature and Landscape, and Benjamin HAUPAIS, 4^th year student at the ational Higher Institute for Nature and Landscape

FRANCE

From left to right: Chilpéric de Boiscuillé, Raphaëlle Chéré, Pauline Szwed and Benjamin Haupais

Chilpéric de Boiscuillé had hardly left the very demanding École Polytechnique [a Swiss higher education institution] in Lausanne when he was offered a job as an assistant lecturer at the Special Architectural School in Paris and a commission without a budget from the Psychiatric Clinic in Chailles (Loir-et-Cher). By associating his architect students with the project and then with his construction, and by using recovered materials, he was to give a new direction to his professional life, which would always combine teaching and construction, while keeping rigour and economy in mind. In 1993, he created the National Higher Institute for Nature and Landscape in Blois, at the request of Jack Lang, and he continually fought against the formalistic action of a certain conception of landscape in order to “conjure the meaning of the project up out of the land, after a diagnosis which is firstly sensitive and then scientific and technical”. In 2009, he founded SATIVA paysage Ltd, with some former landscape engineering students.

Raphaëlle Chéré is a landscape engineer who has had a diploma from the National Higher Institute for Nature and Landscape of Blois since 2007. She has developed a sensitive approach to spaces, with an attachment to a desire to create a feeling of bonding within the sustainable city and to put the user at the heart of the project. In particular, she has worked on inter-generational places (therapeutic garden, people-plant relationship) and has had work published on this subject several times. After spending two years at SETEC TPI, working as closely as possible with technical project management, she joined SATIVA paysage in 2009 to share a project approach which is humanist and pragmatic, but also full of fun and permanently in search of new ways of designing together. In 2010, with the SATIVA team, she created the “jardin migrateur” [migratory garden] within the framework of the national festival of young creation “Imaginez maintenant” [Imagine now] in the “hortillonnages” [marsh plots used for market gardening] of Amiens.

Pauline Szwed is a landscape engineer who has had a diploma from the National Higher Institute for Nature and Landscape of Blois since 2007. Her professional experiences in France, in teams of architects, town planners and engineers, and abroad in Canada, Peru, New Caledonia, Libya and China, enabled her to build a landscape project approach which is multidisciplinary, cultural and sensitive. She has also been involved in ephemeral garden projects and contributed to the creation of spatial installations for Montreal’s “Paysages éphémères” [Ephemeral landscapes] and the cultural event “Imaginez maintenant” [Imagine now] in the “hortillonnages” [marsh plots used for market gardening] of Amiens.

Benjamin Haupais is currently a student in his fourth year at the National Higher Institute for Nature and Landscape of Blois. The importance which the course gives to work placements has led him to work in some very different organisations: small French agencies in Vannes for four months, as well as in large Chinese organisations in Shenzhen for five months. By and large, he devotes his free time to extracurricular activities at the ENSNP through his active membership of the student association, the AEIP [Ingenious Association for Landscape Students]: managing / running the cafeteria, organising events, film club, preparing extracurricular trips, etc.

DESIGNERS

THE GARDEN'S PLANTS