In paradise, everything would be easy, abundant, exuberant and effortless. In truth, the exact opposite of a garden, as we know what the fertility and profusion of plants owe to the discreet but repeated steps taken by a gardener. Wanting a garden of paradise, what a happy contradiction! However, what gardener hasn’t already dreamed of seeing the work done without them? In this garden, the steps taken by the gardener are being eliminated. It is the wheelbarrow alone that carries the plants, makes them grow, flower and produce in abundance. A basic tool, both the gardener’s friend and the torturer of their arms, it is replicated several times, arranged into a vast checkerboard that gives order to the flowerbeds and brings the soil closer to the gardener, or even allows them to step back from it entirely...
Au paradis du jardinier, there is no more need to transplant and transport plants until exhausted. The garden becomes a nursery. It borrows its codes, systematics and poetry in tree-lined grids. Unless it is the nursery, provided with bamboo stakes and watering ramps which, receiving a pergola, becomes a garden... Observing, contemplating isn’t that already gardening? The tools laid down, hands free, for a moment of paradise in the garden, in a place where the gardener becomes a spectator to the paradise he or she is inventing...
DESIGNERS
Dominique HENRY, landscape designer and geographer, and Karine STOKLOSA, landscape designer and manager of public gardens and plants
FRANCE
Dominique Henry is a landscape designer and geographer with Le champ d’à côté, a landscaping collective he founded, a lecturer-researcher at the Lille National Graduate School of Architecture and Landscape Engineering and on the editorial board of the online scientific magazine Projets de paysage. Plants and gardens are a passion that he cultivates through observations, drawings, experiments and creations when he is not helping to share them with others. He is particularly interested in the borders of landscapes, in these indistinct boundaries between garden and land, between gardening and agricultural practices, between sensitivity and know-how... the foundation of landscape quality.
Karine Stoklosa is a landscape designer and manager of public gardens and parks. After her first career as an urban planner, she now strives to translate planning projects into gardened realities, to design enjoyable urban revegetation spaces for city dwellers and to express landscape poetry within public institutions with the involvement of gardeners. She currently manages the Service des Espaces Verts (green spaces department) of a large town in the Paris region.
