Gilles Clément, France’s most influential garden maker, has been inspiring professionals and home gardeners alike for decades. Now in his eighties, he remains a charismatic teacher and speaker, drawing crowds of young people to lectures and workshops. They especially like his refusal to separate concept and practice, head and hands, and his defense of a humanist ecology where people – gardeners – enjoy mutually beneficial partnerships with the rest of the living world. Despite international renown as a designer, he has always called himself a gardener.
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In 1969 as a conscientious objector to military service he was sent to work in Nicaragua, which gave him a taste for international travel. A later trip to Bali, in Indonesia, completely changed his perceptions of habitable spaces and gardening.
We can no longer, in my opinion, garden without being aware of ecosystems
In the early 1970s, having first studied agricultural engineering, he trained as a landscape architect and began to promote the idea of working with, not against nature – his design agency, Acanthe was named to salute both architecture and botany. He has since taught at the prestigious Versailles School of Landscape Architecture and created parks all over France.
His colour-themed gardensat the Parc André Citroën in Parisinvite participation. It’s said that when mothers take their children into the park’s Green garden, linked to the theme of silence, they often stop talking.
A wide French public appreciates his witty and engaging writings about gardens, but he’s also admired by gardeners and designers around the world. In his 1997 book Nieuwe bloemen, nieuwe Tuinen, written with Henk Gerritsen and Michael King, Piet Oudolf wrote of Gilles: ‘He has shown how ideas may be presented both on the grand scale and in the tiniest detail, making his approach as relevant to the private gardener as it should be to the broader world of the landscape architect’.
Such gardens should not be judged by their form, but by their aptitude to communicate the simple happiness of just being alive
Gilles grew up in Algeria but as a boy spent many holidays in Creuse in the foothills of the Massif Central, where he would chase butterflies in a nearby valley. In 1977, he returned to that valley to build himself a stone house and create the garden he calls La Vallée. No question here of creating an elaborate illusion of ‘wildness’. “Watching wasteland, I was not only fascinated by the energy of nature’s reclamation, I wanted to know how to insert myself in the midst of this powerful flow,” he says. So was born his influential concept of le jardin en mouvement (the garden in motion).
Gilles has always avoided chemicals, fertilisers and pesticides – as a teenager he fell off a ladder while spraying a climbing rose and the insecticide that got into a cut put him in a semi-coma for two days. He believes that human – a gardener’s – care remains central to maintain balance and create beauty. At La Vallée, a fallen tree is simply integrated into his evolving design, while careful horticultural enrichment increases biodiversity. He has always mown and pruned: wild hornbeams are clipped into smooth domes; a path uphill meanders through the heart of a sprawling Cotinus obovatus. Most paths are simply mown grass, their routes changing from year to year to preserve self-seeded clumps of foxglove or verbascum.
Moles have become companion gardeners at La Vallée rather than pests. Gilles sows annuals in their molehills.
An experimental meadow, begun in 1995, is still one of the garden’s most popular features. However, when Monty Don made his television series on French gardens, La Vallée failed to make the final cut, because it was deemed too ‘unkempt’. Not that Gilles worries about messiness. He aims for immersion, not spectatorship. ‘My gardens are meant to be brushed against,’ he has written.
From the start, Gilles recognised a truth still neglected today. “We can no longer, in my opinion, garden without being aware of ecosystems,” he says. On sterile land, the gardener can regenerate the conditions that make life flourish. For him, this approach “owes none of its forms to an idealised cultural vision of space but to the effects of living presences evolving together. If forms and spaces change, it is precisely because life is always inventing”.
His second famous theme, le jardin planétaire (the planetary garden), emerged after seeing the first photographs of Earth from space. He imagined extending the confines, and care, lavished on home gardens to the whole globe. Thus, the Domaine du Rayol botanical garden and arboretum in the South of France juxtaposes ecosystems imitated from Mediterranean climate zones around the world. ‘The main objective,’ writes Gilles, ‘is to encourage biological diversity, a source of wonder and our guarantee for the future.’
And what of art? In a garden, he says, “the beauty experienced does not come from the adjustment of forms – the simple know-how of the landscaper – but from a living ensemble that interweaves humans with plants, animals, sounds and lights… Such gardens should not be judged by their form, but by their aptitude to communicate the simple happiness of just being alive.”