06. À TABLE !
This garden celebrates one of life's simplest pleasures: sharing a meal. It recreates the scene of a garden-party, the main feature of which is one long table surrounded by a meadow of wild flowers and decorated with strange-looking Chinese lanterns.
If you take a closer look at these lights, you'll realise that they're actually carnivorous plants from the Nepenthaceae family, which have just happened to join us for the meal ...
The long table is laid with a collection of extraordinary fruit and vegetable varieties, most of which belong to very old species, produced by pollination and therefore virtually unheard-of, for they are unsuitable for large-scale agriculture. Great care has been taken over cultivating their seeds, which have been passed down the generations like heirlooms for their taste, colour, medicinal properties or ease of adaptation. These black tomatoes, purple peppers, violet cauliflowers, white aubergines, fuschia pink Swiss chard and climbing "spinach", surrounded by flowers and grass of varied textures and shapes, are as surprising as they are familiar.
There's something for everyone to dig into at the À table ! garden. The edible species on display have gorged on the rich nutritional substances of the "garden lasagne", where organic waste is composted. The “olla” system, comprising clay pots that are filled with water and buried in the soil, provides water for the plants. Other pots act as incubators for the carnivorous plants' favourite food: mosquitoes. And as for us humans, we can taste the intensely-flavoured plants, flowers and fruit, hungrily drink in the fragrance of the wild strawberries and varieties of herbaceous plants and feast our eyes on the extraordinary textures and colours of the cabbage family.
designers
Marseille Buiten is an office for landscapearchitecture and the design of public space. It has been founded by Jeroen Marseille in 2012. Marseille Buiten is a network-office, and works together with urban planners, architects and Communities to design and realize public space-projects. Since 2012, it has built projects in Almere, Amstelveen and Vianen, and projects in Zwolle, Duiven, Nijmegen, Leiden and Gorinchem are being prepared at this moment. Marseille Buiten is housed in an old furniture-factory in the city of Utrecht.
Jeroen Marseille was educated at the School of Fine Arts in Utrecht and received his Master of Arts-degree in 2001. Het started working at Karres en Brands Landscapearchitects in 2000 and worked as a projectleader on public space projects all over The Netherlands. From 2010-2012 he worked as a projectleader at Strootman Landscapearchitects. Because of this wide experience, he is capable of working within the different scales of a project. The quality of details and materials is an essential part of a design, and only by communicating this quality with all the people involved, a work can grow to a succes. In the last years, Jeroen Marseille has proved he's capable of achieving this.
Monika Popczyk is born in Varsovia, Poland. She moves to the Netherlands to study architecture at the Delft University of Technology. A passion for landscape architecture is accompanying her during entire study time. After graduating as an architect and working as such for several years, she decides to change the direction of her professional life and applies for a position at Karres and Brands Landscape Architecture, where she participates in a diversity of national and international projects of various scales. Several years later she moves to Spain and continues working in landscape architecture branch. In collaboration with Spanish and international teams, she realizes various landscape and public space projects in Spain and abroad, from Madrid to Prague, to Almaty. In 2014 she founds her own firm mpLANDarch. Currently she is working on her second large public space project in Prague, Czech Republic.
