16. les belles aux eaux dormantes

And the muses aim to bewitch them once again, or, if they’re already bewitched, exalt them yet further, fashion them in their image, intensify their power through a new vegetable association.
Each rosebush is poised on an unobtrusive pedestal and the roses themselves seem to rise up out of black waters. Confronted with green and brown arrays of rushes and reeds, their myriad-coloured inflorescences waft anyone who glimpses them away on a dreamlike journey where the rosebushes are set on marshland waters.
In such a context, the roses’ powers in the arts of seduction and love become infinite.
The garden becomes both a metaphor for an unlikely love tryst between roses and wetland vegetation; a lacy relief of torn-down, broken rushes from which the flowers emerge, true objects of desire; metaphor for a harmless flower that seems to possess all possible powers. A flower that oversees a silent celebration and which makes all dreams possible.
Roses in copses confronted by clusters of reeds, roses growing among scatterings of sweetgrass, roses in the foreground, set before a fringe of sagittaria, and roses standing alone on the surface of open waters spangled with waterlilies – all provide their own special ambiences. Roses that pose for the photographer, the voyeur, the dreamer or the muses.

Designer

Sylvestre LIEUTIER, landscape architect
FRANCE

Sylvestre Lieutier was born in Dourdan in 1973. Between the ages of 5 and 14, he accompanied his parents on hiking holidays in France, Italy, Spain and the United States, in the course of which he developed a fascination for the beauty of flowers and nature. During this period in his life, he read a great many novels and popular works on science, astronomy in particular. He collected stones, minerals, fossils and insects, and created his own herbarium. His grandfather’s extensive river-bordered market garden with its wood and orchard was his playground and left its mark on him forever. At the age of 7, he created his first garden on a little plot of land.

From the age of 14 onwards, he regularly spent his holidays at the seaside, painting and reproducing impressionist paintings in gouache, and playing tennis assiduously – a sport that gave him a taste for clay surfacing and fine trajectories.

After obtaining a Science Baccalaureate, he enrolled at Paris Higher School of Garden Architecture (ESAJ), then under the directorship of Allain Provost, and graduated as a landscaper in 1997.

He has worked with a variety of ecological study offices, for which, among other things, he has carried out floristic surveys, implemented riverbank and wetland landscaping projects and drawn up differentiated management plans. In 2003, he joined forces with Mathieu Lacreuse and Cesario Carena to create a garden entitled “Le Pénitencier des Mauvaises Herbes” (The Weeds’ Penitentiary) for the Chaumont-sur-Loire Garden Festival, and became a freelance landscaper and illustrator. Since then, he has created gardens for local authorities and the private sector, including luxury hotels. And since 2012, alongside these activities, he has been painstakingly laying out an entomological garden and a rose garden in the family garden.
Sylvestre Lieutier has always liked combining gardens and poetry, and this association has become a real passion. He makes up stories based on the idea of gardens. In 2006, Rustica published a work of his entitled “Le jardin de l’amour et autres jardins imaginaires” (The Garden of Love and Other Imaginary Gardens). For several years now, he has also acted as editor and illustrator for various gardening magazines.