48. Le jardin méditerranéen
Garden by Jean Mus
“When mineral meets vegetable and time glorifies them both: the true image of country life is to be found here, in this mise en scène. The Mediterranean pays Paradise a visit, poetry takes possession of history, and life is lived to the sound of music.” Jean Mus
Such is the art of living that Jean Mus wished to offer you in order to share the Earth’s pleasures and Humanity’s joys. A garden with multiple perspectives, casting a questioning eye on time with its venerable walls, old pond, fountain and half-hidden paving… The mineral merges with the wealth of greenery, among olive trees, cypresses and fig trees, emblematic guardians of a Mediterranean identity. You reach it over a stone bridge, crossing the moat and making your way through the door of time.
designer
Born in Grasse, the world’s perfume capital, and raised by a father who was head gardener at Villa Croisset and who taught him the joys of work well done, Jean Mus was marked by the creative genius of artists, architects, decorators and such landscapers as Ferdinand Bac, who designed gardens and stage sets alike.
A graduate of Versailles School of Landscape, he has designed over a thousand gardens. For more than thirty years now, he has been composing, imagining and revisiting a mythical, deliciously sensuous south. Inspired by the wild, delicate nature of the Mediterranean basin, whose borders he has further extended, he is heir to the last century’s great landscapers who instilled new spirit into the Côte d’Azur’s most celebrated gardens.
Who among us does not harbour images of Mediterranean shores gleaned from magazines, landscapes tinted with poetic rusticity and unfettered exuberance? As often as not, they reflect gardens created by Jean Mus.
He combines age-old knowhow with design of spaces and ambiences that pay due respect to the environment and the memory of the sites involved, without disavowing the years of acclimatisation and exoticism. He keeps in mind the knowledge and experience of his forebears, so ensuring that his gardens live and prosper in balance with the landscape and the passage of time. “The best gift you can give a gardener is to know that he has operated in a garden but that you’re not aware of the fact.”
To demand often influenced by passing fashions, he brings appropriate, coherent solutions, in tune with his customers’ wishes and based on the genius loci.
Jean Mus brings all five senses to bear in his creations. He doesn’t particularly like being characterised as a designer. Instead, referencing the famous 19th-century French landscaper Edouard André, he prefers to call himself a painter, for his sense of colour, shape, harmony and composition, a poet for the dreamlike, fantastical and imaginative qualities of his work, and an architect, for his understanding of proportions, scale, concepts, volumes and space. And above all a gardener, with an intuitive knowledge of earth, water, sun and nature.
These days, his one wish is to share his emotions, feelings and aspirations so that his gardens lead their visitors back to the “green” paradise…that of childhood.
“The garden is a place of encounters and celebration, where each according to their own references will find the experience they are looking for.” Jean Mus
A committed ambassador for Provence, Jean Mus, Mediterranean landscaper, has taken his Mediterranean style across the whole world.
