Paris Journal 2009 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
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One day earlier this week, we took a long walk down through the 15th arrondissement via the rue Saint Charles to the Parc Andre Citroën. I know I write something about this park every year, but I just can’t miss the opportunity to say, once more, what a highly successful park it is. As it ages, it just gets better. I believe that most of the credit should go to the two landscape designers on the project, but there were also three architects involved. There are a number of gardens within the park, each one named for a color that it emphasizes. The park also features a grand open space in the middle, with plenty of room for families to lounge on the grass and for children to run and play. At one end, a dancing-waters fountain is open to the kids during hot weather. In the middle, hot air balloon rides are offered. The two landscape designers are French. One, Gilles Clément, was born in 1943 and is known mostly as a gardener, garden designer, botanist, entomologist, and writer. He’s from the central France city of Argenton-sur-Creuse. The other, landscape architect Allain Provost, also designed several other parks in Paris, including the Parc Floral in the Bois de Vincennes – a place that features jazz concerts every summer. In 1990, he established the Groupe Signe with landscape architect Alain Cousseran. Parc Andre Citroën opened in 1992. I wondered what these two designers have done since then? Allain has collaborated on the creation of a park at La Courneuve, out in the northeast suburbs of Paris. He’s also worked on projects at the Charles de Gaulle airport and the Eurotunnel at Calais. And he contributed to a re-design of the banks of the Rhone in Lyon. With Jacques Sgard, he was awarded the Grand Prize in Landscaping in 1994. Gilles Clement won that prize in 1998. He teaches horticultural engineering at the l'École nationale supérieure du paysage at Versailles. In his work, he says “I would like to show the extreme diversity that exists on the planet.” Gilles is quite the activist, too. He was so disappointed at the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as President that he decided to cancel all his contracts with the French government and to begin, instead, “projects of resistance.” The first one of these began in June 2007, in response to an art project ordered for the Biennale d’art contemporain de Melle. This garden, designed to be sustainable, consists of a water garden and a nettle garden with plants that can be used to make “purin d’orties,” a sort of natural combined fertilizer/insecticide/fungicide. To make it, you mash up a kilo of nettles in 10 liters of water. You mix the resulting liquid with water (a 10 percent solution) and spray it on your plants. The second “project of resistance” is a garden in the necropole de Tuvixeddu at Cagliari in Sardinia, in response to an order placed by Renato Soru, the president of that region. Before giving up his contracts with the French government, Gilles worked with Jean Nouvel on designing the garden at the Musée du Quai Branly. Regular readers know that this is another one of my favorite gardens, featuring plants that I know from my life in the swamp. Like every good academic, Gilles has quite a list of publications. Some recent ones of interest include: · Gilles Clément, une écologie humaniste (with Louisa Jones) 2006; · Où en est l'herbe ? Réflexions sur le jardin planétaire (Where is the herb? Reflections on the planetary garden) (with Louisa Jones) 2006; · Environ(ne)ment - Manières d'agir pour demain (Environment – Ways to fight for tomorrow) (with Philippe Rahm) 2006 (bilingual edition); · Le Jardin en mouvement, de la Vallée au Jardin planétaire (The Garden in Movement, from the Valley to the Planetary Garden) 2007 re-issue; and ·
Toujours
la vie invente (Always the Invented Life) 2008 (ISBN 275260422X). Gilles sounds like someone to invite to Sanibel. Perhaps he could give a lecture for the Conservation Foundation. Speaking of Sanibel, our friends Jim and Maddy took us to lunch yesterday at the neighborhood brasserie, La Tour Eiffel. We sat in the sun at tables on the sidewalk, right across from the old village church of St. John the Baptist of Grenelle. It was very pleasant, and we had a pleasant server, too. We took a short walk through the park at St. Lambert, where Maddy noted a sign informing us that it had once been a gas works. Très quinzieme, I thought. We walked past the formal and elegant town hall for the 15th, and then we examined the Square Vergennes. Clouds were gathering, so we ambled back to the apartment where Tom and I watched the Tour de France while Jim and Maddy worked on jet-lag recovery. In the evening, they left for the Gare de Lyon, to catch their train to the south of France. And so ended a nice day with nice friends.
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Thursday, July 23, 2009
In the Blue Garden at the Parc Andre Citroën. Below, more scenes from the gardens in this
park.
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