Nonot only, or no longer, a romantic retreat or a bourgeois idyll. The garden has become a place where biodiversity, social justice, community values, a sustainable future for all are experienced. And which are the most emblematic, the ones that really made the difference? The exhibition Garden Futures: Designing with Natureuntil 3 October at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, near Basel, goes through hundreds of examples, from which we have drawn five: from the hermitage cultivated with loving obstinacy in the shadow of a nuclear power plant to the labyrinth of boxwood born as a whim and become a national monument.
«Gardens and landscapes have a lot to teach us about how to rethink and shape our relationship with nature» write the curators. «In our research we have encountered places, traditions, gardeners, artists and philosophers who have set an example and left a trace». But above all a lesson: you don’t always have to look for great solutions, sometimes it’s more useful to think small.
A glimpse of life
Director Derek Jarman’s garden in Kent, which grew next to a nuclear power station
Prospect Cottage is a fisherman’s cottage on Dungeness headland, the south coast of England, and is located a short distance from a nuclear power station. Director Derek Jarman noticed it by chance while visiting Kent with Tilda Swinton, instinctively decided to buy it (it cost £32,000) and spent the last years of his life there before being killed in 1994 by complications from AIDS . Around the cottage, he cultivated his garden with patience and obstinacy: when a first experiment with roses failed, he planted broom, cabbage, lavender, marigolds, herbs… Poetry without fences, grown up in a desolate landscape where the power plant looms like a disquieting spaceship.
Labyrinth ‘800
The gardens of Marqueussac, France, drawn around 1860
With six kilometers of walks and 150,000 centenary box trees disciplined by stubborn pruning work, Marqueyssac it is the most visited garden in southwestern France. Built around a romantic castle overlooking the Périgord region from atop a hill, it was “sketched” by a pupil of André Le Nôtre, the landscape painter of Versailles, but owes its current layout to Julien de Lavergne de Cerval, in the 19th century. Inspired by what he had seen in Italy, he used the “Buxus sempervirens” to build his idea of paradise on earth. Marqueyssac was opened to the public by entrepreneur Kléber Rossillon, who acquired the property in 1996 and spent more than a year restoring it. Today it is classified as a National Historic Landmark.
The sacred oases
Bird’s-eye view of the church of Debre Ensesa and its sacred grove
In Ethiopiawhere the vast majority of the population lives in rural areas, agriculture has eaten up almost all the spontaneous vegetation. Now that ninety percent of the forests have been lost, the “church forests” of the Orthodox Tewahedo church, surrounded by their sacred groves, have become oases of biodiversity and as such we try to protect them. Groups of activists are working alongside priests to preserve and where possible expand these green belts. At the same time, an attempt is made to create a new awareness among the local communities, so that they take action to protect the endangered ecosystem. A “bottom-up” environmentalism that is bearing fruit.
Vertical gardens
“Highrise of Homes”, the skyscraper imagined by James Wine in 1981
American artist and architect James Wine, born in 1932, with his multidisciplinary studio Site was in the seventies and eighties one of the most original voices of theenvironmentalism applied to design. More than for his completed projects, he is remembered for his “visions”, drawings (and thoughts) that speculate on the future of cities.
The most striking is Highrise of Homesfrom 1981, a vertical forest well ahead of its time, which combines the typology of the multi-storey building with the American dream of the detached house. In this vertical community framed in a metal grid, which reduces soil consumption with height development, each house has its own garden, to be cultivated in private.
The shared block
Artist Liz Christy in the community garden on the Bowery, 1976
Corner of Bowery and Houston Streets, up a lot snatched from real estate speculation, the Liz Christy Garden is the first and most Old New York Community Garden. It bears the name of the woman who created it, Liz Christy: artist and activist, in the early seventies she gave life to Green Guerrillasan organization of volunteers whose mission was to improve the quality and quantity of public green spaces in the city.
«The term “community garden” – wrote Christy – expresses the dependence we have on each other, united by the same primary needs». For its concrete counteroffensive, the movement invented seed bombsor “seed bombs”, still today a symbol of ecological antagonism.
iO Woman © REPRODUCTION RESERVED