Gilles Clément revisited: biology, art and ecology. A reply to Danielle Dagenais

Abstract

In ‘The Garden of Movement: Ecological Rhetoric in Support of Gardening Practice’ (Studies in the History of Gardening and Designed Landscapes, 24, pp. 313-340), Danielle Dagenais examines documents presenting the work of French designer Gilles Clement at the Parc Citroen in Paris. Her conclusion - that the designer uses ‘ecological rhetoric’ as a ‘post-facto justification’ for ‘garden art’ - is misguided, not least in its implications of opportunism on Clement's part. 1 Dagenais ascribes somewh]at arbitrarily certain descriptive terms to the vocabulary of ‘ecological rhetori’, and others to ‘garden art’ ,2 but Clement himself at this period links his work to one frame of reference only: ‘biology’. By substituting ‘ecology’ for ‘biology’ and furthermore using ‘ecological’ criteria that Clement explicitly rejects (i.e., plant selection by origin rather than behaviour and species diversity rather than evolutionary capacity), Dagenais reaches misleading conclusions, as she herself suggests after belated discovery of an early article which must deeply affect her argument. 3 My own conclusions (merely sketched here4 ) have evolved from regular interviews with Clement since 1986, preparation for several books in which his work is discussed and extensive reading of his writings, including unpublished manuscripts and the four books just published in 2005.