Gardeners today sometimes think saving the planet means sacrificing pleasure for duty. Even with our swing towards naturalistic gardening, it seems that ecologists and gardeners are often opposed in their approach, with each side picking art or ethics. French botanist-gardener Véronique Mure insists you can have both, and enjoy every minute of it.
Véronique grew up in the Mediterranean region of southern France, spending weekends in the garrigue landscape, which supports many of the tough, drought-resistant plants that are becoming increasingly familiar to UK gardeners adapting to climate change. She went on to study ecology and botany at the University of Montpellier, where she was taught by Francis Hallé, the botanist and biologist known for his innovative research on the architecture of trees.
The gardener must be both a naturalist, and an artist who chooses acceptable forms
After graduating, she worked briefly as a garden consultant, before being elected to deputy mayor of Nîmes for seven years, during which time she was responsible for public gardens, forest and environment.
Today, she divides her time between teaching botany at Marseille’s prestigious École Nationale Supérieure du Paysage de Versailles-Marseille, with running her Nîmes-based consultancy, Botanique-Jardins-Paysages, where she is pioneering a new professional role for botanists in the design of large-scale public projects. When ancient plane trees along the 240km of the Canal du Midi needed replacing, Véronique was asked to advise on appropriate species. She’s also worked with dry-gardening guru Olivier Filippi and with landscape architects APS to plant the dramatic hilltop Jardin des Migrations around Marseille’s Mediterranean museum, Mucem.
It’s not plagiarising nature to draw inspiration from it
Alongside her many public projects, there have been personal ones too. For 11 years, from 2003, Véronique and her late husband took on 12 acres of former agricultural land, known as La Bigotie, in
the Dordogne, where Véronique set about creating her ideal garden, restoring the small ecosystems she observed. In her 2010 book, Les jardins de la Bigotie: petit traité de biodiversité appliquée, she wrote of the garden: ‘Every plot, every hedge, every pond… is a great reservoir of biodiversity. From the wetlands at the bottom of the valley, populated by horsetails, up to the dry hills where sedum, oregano and salad burnet flourish, passing through a small forest of black oaks growing in a joyful disarray.’
Whether what she created is technically a garden may be a moot point but Véronique argues that while tasks such as reconstituting plant groups, gradually normalising the nitrogen content of too-rich soils, removing the most invasive plants for the benefit of the most timid, and selecting and spreading favoured seeds, may not be part of ordinary horticulture, they are undeniably gardening. “It’s not plagiarising nature to draw inspiration from it and take advantage of its processes rather than fight against them,” she says.
Early on she abandoned what she describes as the “extravagant idea” of keeping things clean, and made the colourful wildflowers growing in nearby meadows and verges central to the planting. “We wanted to make the most of their appeal,” she says. “We tested sweet peas, yarrow and fennel seed harvested along the road, producing mixes easily adapted to the soil and climate of our site.”
The result was meadows that produced an explosion of flowers, including ox-eye daisies, field scabious, viper’s bugloss, greater knapweed, common yarrow, wild carrot, native vetch and patches
of wild orchids, all allowed to spread freely.
The main objective of any gardening practice should be to help the roots achieve autonomy
Unlike other naturalistic designers, who often recommend starting from a weed-free site even if that needs to be chemically obtained, Véronique’s approach is to explore what is already there, and how it works – or doesn’t – to establish a solid, realistic base for resistant, long-lasting design. Ongoing change is part of the plan, so she works with evolving communities, not fixed lists of individual species. “All their lives, plants progress in the soil as well as in the air,” she says, “endlessly reinventing their relationship with others.” In her view, “the gardener must be both a naturalist who knows the plants, their needs and their dynamics, and an artist who chooses acceptable forms.”
Last year, Véronique gave a captivating talk at the Dynamic Vision symposium in Mannheim, Germany, where she drew attention to the underestimated wonders of plants’ root systems. “The main objective of any gardening practice should be to help the roots achieve a certain degree of autonomy, particularly with regard to water, but also to provide them with a living soil and thus encourage symbiotic associations that enable them to live together as a community,” she says. “Of course, gardeners are reassured to see that the plants they look after are growing well, flowering and bearing fruit. But unconsciously, by spending time improving the soil, decompacting or watering it, they are gardening the roots.”
For Véronique, such ecological balance is not added on, but built in from the start. The pleasures are those of co-operation and community, not control; not so much the wow factor perhaps, but gentle, everyday and ever-changing wonderment.
Useful information Find out more about Véronique Mure’s work at botanique-jardins-paysages.com