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Les jardins du Rivau : où le jardin est vu comme un art et une thérapie par la couleur by Patricia Laigneau – Château de Bénouville
The Rivau gardens: where the garden is seen as an art and therapy through colour
“Colour is a power which directly influences the soul,” Kandinsky, The Spiritual in Art
Since 1995, Patricia Laigneau has been imagining and renewing the Rivau gardens. These contemporary gardens strive to breathe a new lease of modern life into the traditional landscaped garden, whilst fitting perfectly within the geometry of the surrounding rural environment.
The Rivau gardens are inspired by pictorial research via the theory of colours. Plants are used as a means of expression: graminae soften and blur the colour of flowers. Floral associations with grasses, perennials, bulbous plants and roses offer a constant and ever-changing succession of plant life throughout the year.
A garden of naturalistic inspiration, but also a garden of volume, its architectural design composes undulating and vaporous masses alternating with textured masses that combine to stir the visitor’s emotion.
Open to the public, the Rivau gardens explore the universal language of the sensual power of plants, through their colours, their scents and their graphics. They invite visitors to grasp this mode of expression.
Patricia Laigneau
Patricia Laigneau is an art historian and modern art specialist who considers herself as a garden artist. She believes that, just like other art forms, the garden can offer an expression of a given period in time. In 1992, she fell in love with the Château du Rivau in the Val de Loire which she bought with her husband. She recreated the gardens seeking inspiration in contemporary artists. She followed a continuing education programme dispensed by the ENSP (National Graduate School of Landscape) in Versailles, seeking further in-depth knowledge of her passion via reading and gardening practice.
Further reading :
Jardins et contes de fées au château du Rivau, Editions Gaud, 2008