When
JUNE
Friday 5th, (for schools)
Saturday 6th
Sunday 7th

Where

Les Jardins du Château de Padiès, Lempaut (81)

What

Workshops through the weekend with Bureau Bas Smets, the award winning Landscape Architects, who worked on the Padiès strategy plan.

Rationale/theme for the Rendez-vous aux Jardins 2009 :

“Terre, terrain, territoire” / “Soil, terrain, territory”

The soil is the foundation of the garden, it feeds its plants, determines its shape, builds its reliefs and inscribes it in a landscape which reaches beyond its boundaries.
The theme chosen for the 2009 edition of Rendez-vous aux jardins “Soil, Terrain, Territory” covers not only the pedological aspect (science that studies the soil) – of course it can be broken down according to a scientific approach – but also covers a historic cultural and aesthetic approach, not to mention concerns for sustainable development.
Since the Renaissance, the major treaties on the art of gardens like “la recepte véritable” by … Bernard Palissy (1563), Le Théâtre d’agriculture by Olivier de Serres (1600), Le Traité du jardinage by Jacques Boyceau (1638), Le jardin de plaisir of Claude (his son Andrée?) Mollet (1651), La Théorie et la pratique du jardinage of Antoine-Joseph DEZALLIER of Argenville (1709), L’Art des jardins of Édouard André (1879) or Le bon jardinier (1992) stressed the importance of the soil in the composition of a garden. All spoke of its properties, texture and structure and the necessary amendments to improve productivity. They also showed the importance of the choice of terrain and how to modify it, to shape it to be more productive or more attractive. From the modern period, most authors have presented the interaction between gardens and their territory and in particular the influence of the layout of each on the other.
These concerns, written into the history of gardens for a long time, are still relevant today.

Soil
“As long as I was a distracted and distant spectator of the work of gardeners, I considered them as persons of a particularly delicate and poetic nature who cultivated the scent of flowers while listening to birdsong. Now that I see things more closely, I realize that a real gardener is not a person who cultivates flowers, but a person who cultivates the ground, a creature who buries themselves in the soil, leaving the theater of what is above to us, the gawks, good for nothing. The gardener lives down in the earth. He builds a monument in piles of earth. Should he arrive at the garden called “Paradise”, he would breath in in ecstasy, and say : “Good God, this is humus!” (Karel Capek, The Gardener’s Year, 1929).

The soil, defined as the surface of the earth after the weathering of rocks, consists of minerals, air, water and organic matter, evolving with the action of climate and vegetation. It determines the flora and is their physical and nutritive support. Soil is characterized by its color, the degree of acidity (pH), its thermal properties (warm, cool), by its texture and its granular composition (stony, sandy loam, silty soil …), its structure (malleable, compact, heavy, light, granular …), by its mineral or organic composites (humus, silica, limestone …). The ground can change as a result of mechanical work (crop rotation, plowing, hoeing …) or be enriched deliberately to adapt to other cultures (fertilization, amendments …).

Now, faced with the need to promote the preservation of ecosystems and, in general, biodiversity, man has developed several methods of soil management and maintenance as well as alternative methods of gardening which are essential to the longevity of gardens and landscapes. Preparation and loosening of the soil are essential to enable plants to thrive. Whatever the nature of the land, the organization of the soil layers must be respected in order to preserve the living creatures, from worms to bacteria, which make all the richness and hold the keys to the fertility of the garden.

Terrain
The creators of great gardens (from Olivier de Serres to Gilles Clément) have all stressed the importance of the choice of terrain in the creation of a garden. They call it “the table” “the base”, “the seat” and more recently “the site”, the choice is decisive.
Before any development, a topographic study, or survey, is needed to determine the characteristics of the terrain and to place them on a plan.
Earth-moving operations are used to modify the natural shape of a terrain to create reliefs and to build hydraulic systems. Such relief may take the form of terraces, amphitheaters, Vertugadin, valleys, ridges or artificial mounds as in the Garden of Cosmic Speculation created by Charles Jencks in Scotland.
The terrain also retains all the memories of past transactions and is an important source for the archaeology of gardens, their history and their evolution. In France, the archaeology of gardens is a recent discipline, we have excavated pleasure gardens over the past fifteen years based on methods implemented in England and in Italy. In our country, the parks and gardens of Vallery, Saint Cloud, of Chamarande, Marly, Méréville, of Versailles, Sauvan, the Rodin Museum in Paris, Olivier de Serres’ garden in Pradel, the Gallo-Roman villa Richebourg, of Croscro, of Kerjean … were the subject of archaeological prospection. An idea emerges from these excavations: the garden is a space in evolution, with constant modifications. Through this in depth knowledge, we reassess the importance of the phase of preparation and the foundation of the garden. The archaeology of gardens endeavours to reveal and to interpret the invisible traces of successive landscaping interventions which mark their history, it opens the door to a new understanding of the deep structures of the site and its integration into the environment.
This in depth knowledge of the terrain presents a great interest to demonstrate the dynamics of the garden as a work that is not static, designed once and for all, then preserved and restored; on the contrary, the garden lives and changes over time. It also raises the question of restoration, notably the choice of frame of reference. Do we choose to follow documentary evidence, or do we choose to base the restoration on what is still visible?

Territory
Even if the garden is an enclosed space, it is inseparable from the area defined as “an area of land which depends on a state, a town a jurisdiction,..” by the dictionary.
Every garden is placed in a territorial context, in a geography that goes well beyond land boundaries. Since its creation, it disrupts the existing networks (river water, road, human …), it redistributes interrelationships (water is diverted, captured, channeled; roads are deviated, altered, created; and villages, and towns are organized differently around them…). Moreover, it involves new players (job creation for maintenance) or alters ecosystems: some habitats are destroyed while others are created, others ecosystems are created which will interact with the world outside of the garden.
Since the twelfth century, Cistercian monks manage the territory. To transform the land into fertile and prosperous valleys, for which they are renowned, the Cistercians had to drain and improve them, build dams, dig canals, move river beds, divert floods and invent all sorts of stratagems to make the site habitable. Abbeys, just as the large seigniorial domains of the seventeenth century, with gardens and parks, were a territorial network branched yet heterogeneous and discontinuous but showing a plurality of territories that has to be taken into account to arrive at an larger approach to the landscape.
What remains today of these developments? Sprawling hydraulic networks, perspectives, crow’s feet or major vistas in the areas of Versailles, Sceaux, Compiègne Pontchartrain, Bailleul, Digoine … remain as core axis which structure the urbanized landscape – the territory. The visual link between the garden and its environment is often conserved or deserves to be just as the social and economic ties established a long time ago.
A territorial approach to the garden allows us to understand that it is not a small enclave of paradise, an island disconnected from its environment. Such an approach, and the use of existing regulatory tools allows us to avoid irreparable damage that may be caused by the installation, even remote, of various infrastructures.