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Des amitiés botaniques déployées au jardin – Morceaux choisis du XVIIIe au XXe siècle by Véronique MURE – ONLINE
Botanical friendships deployed to serve the garden – Chosen snippets from the 13th to the 20th century
Over the centuries, the palette of plants in our gardens has evolved. Networks of professional and amateur botanists, and of learned enthusiasts, have often promoted the dissemination of certain plant species, leading to a genuine botanic identity card for the parks and gardens of each historic period. Not only black Italian poplars, cedars, magnolias, Osage orange trees, but also bamboos and palm trees tell the stories of these friendships between men and women with a passion… from the 18th to the 20th century in particular. This presentation will focus on a few examples of these very special connections. Just like the Count Victor Maurice Riquet de Caraman, owner of the Canal du Midi, loved to share his passion for botanics with Louis XV then with Marie Antoinette, who entrusted him with the plans for the very first park at the Trianon; or like Chateaubriand and Joséphine; or the passion that drove Eugène Mazel; the creator of the Prafrance bamboo garden near Nîmes, to sow his own seeds through the nearby parks and market gardens thanks to his friendship with Ernest Pichon, in charge of culture…
Véronique Mure
Véronique Mure, a botanist and engineer in tropical agronomy, has been defending the heritage value of Mediterranean gardens and landscapes for 30 years, via their history and the botanic dynamics they embrace.
A vast share of her career has been in the public domain.
Today, she works as an independent expert and consultant in botany, gardens and landscapes. Founded in 2010, the private company Botanique-Jardins-Paysage, established in Nîmes, specialises in the study of flora, in particular of Mediterranean origin, and its links with gardens and the landscape, be they from a naturalistic, historic or prospective point of view.
She regularly intervenes on natural heritage sites (listed sites, World Heritage, ‘Grand Site de France’ policy, etc.). Hence, she has worked on the many botanical facettes of the MuCEM’s Garden of Migration (Marseille), conducted the study on the renewal of the alignments alongside the Canal du Midi, a Unesco World Heritage site, accompanied the historic gardens of the Fort St. André Abbey in Villeneuve-les-Avignon and the Prafrance bamboo garden, and conducted the historic study on the tree heritage of the former ‘Pichon’ nursery in Nîmes.
Whether during analytic missions, or consultancy and interpretation, Véronique Mure strives to offer living things their rightful place in gardens and landscapes. Such is the conviction she loves to share and to transmit, and the one that has spurred her to publish several works and to teach botanics at the ENSP (National School of Landscape Architecture – Versailles).
Further reading :
Conversations sur l’herbe, Atelier Baie, 2013
Les jardins de la Bigotie, Atelier Baie, 2010