Planetary creator of the Gardens

Landscape designer, essay writer, novelist, creator very inspired of the exposure of the “Planetary Garden”, Gilles Clément is one of the rare artists and French thinkers to have a holistic vision of the unit “ecology + culture.”

Gilles Clement
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Gilles Clément, born in Argenton (Indre) in 1943 is a gardener, landscape designer, botanist, entomologist and writer.

Horticultural engineer of formation and teaching at the national School of the landscape of Versailles, he is the author of a theory of the “planetary garden” and concept of non-static garden. This practice rests on the observation which a landscape is not fixed. Instead of confining the plants in a precise place in order to organize a creation, it is advisable to let the plantations “permanently redraw” the garden. Today’s form will not necessarily be the same and at the same place, with next flowering. It thus argues in favour to the interbreeding species, which Clement rather calls mixing, and which was woven with the wire of the ages. The Landscape designer consider with as much benevolence the insane grasses, which try to push the paving stones out of the sterility of the cities, as the rarest species planted in prestigious parks. It integrate the globalisation of the current world by the “planetarisation” of the garden’s ground like place of life: “I would like to show extreme diversity of what exists on the planet”.

Another famous writing of Gilles Clement present the idea of the Third-Landscape

The Third-Landscape – Undecided fragment of the Planetary Garden indicates the sum of spaces where the man does not interact with the evolution of the landscape leaving it only to nature. It relates to the forsaken urban or rural spaces of transition, the waste lands, marshes, moors, peat bogs, but also the edges of road, banks, slopes of railways, etc…

Compared with the whole of the territories subjected to the control and the exploitation of the man, the Third-Landscape constitutes the privileged space of reception of biological diversity. The cities, the farms and forest, the sites dedicated to industry, tourism, the human activity, the space of control and decision select diversity and sometimes exclude it completely . The number of species listed in a field, a culture or a managed forest is weak compared to numbers listed in one forsaken area.

Considered under this angle the Third-landscape seems the genetic tank of the planet, the space of the future…

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