Jardin de 100 ans > French Garden of Peace, 2019

Jardin de 100 ans > French Garden of Peace, 2019

The Jardin de 100 ans evokes a century of peace that has allowed a rich and abundant nature to colonize and evolve on lands destroyed by war. A hundred years ago … The war ended to leave behind families, as well as landscapes, devastated. In the afforestation plot where the French Peace Garden is inscribed, a seasoned eye can see these decades of history under its eyes because the forest has regained its rights: it has gone from a “pioneer” stage (colonizing vegetation freshly returned soils) at an “advanced” stage (vegetation rich in afforestation under development that can reach a state of climax without human intervention). This evolution, visible, of 100 years of peace is all that the garden presents to the public by discreet circulations and times of breaks to soak up the peaceful atmosphere of the forest. It shows the different environments that make up a wood, from clearing to dense afforestation. In the small space of the garden, this century-old “forest extract” is presented in a concentrated way in order to read the stages of evolution of the forest and to trace the time of history, in a form of intimacy that offers the calm of the site. In this mosaic of forest landscapes, felled trees are left behind, an undergrowth is gardened, a clearing offers a skylight to allow the small fauna (peaks, insects, small mammals) to come and live in the spirit of the garden and participate, to a certain extent, in a form of praise for life that the forest magnifies.

“He had not worried about the war at all. He had imperturbably continued to plant. ” L’homme qui plantait des arbres – Jean Giono