基本説明
After a brilliant career as a stylist in Paris and New York, culminating in ten years with Hermès, Nicole de Vésian (1916-1996) retired to Provence where, at the age of seventy, she began designing La Louve. Now a European icon, this garden was soon inspiring designers and gardeners from New Zealand to New England. Nicole
de Vésian had, as Louisa Jones puts it, "a feeling for space the way some musicians have perfect pitch—for volumes, planes and textures, all transformed by the liquid Mediterranean light." On these narrow terraces, she created a garden for year-round living, minimalist but sensuous. The plants she shaped into beautifully proportioned, grey and green tapestries were often the very species which grow wild on the hillside opposite:
cypress, laurel, arbutus, rosemary and thyme. Some visitors consider this a formal garden, others see it as wild, or even Japanese. Vésian also designed other gardens nearby, largely unknown, presented here for the first time.
Louisa Jones reflects on Vésian's art, on her evolution and the qualities that make her works cherished by so many even long after her death. Jones includes a rich selection of testimonials from former colleagues such as Marc Nucera and Jean-Marie Rey, distinguished visitors such as Christopher Lloyd, and garden historians including John Brookes and Sir Roy Strong.
Full Description
Newly updated edition of the first book in French and English devoted to Nicole de Vésian and her work
After a career as a designer working for the great design houses, especially Hermès, Nicole de Vésian (1916-1996) moved to Provence and created her first garden. Her green and grey tapestry-gardens soon inspired gardeners and landscapers around the world. Today, few gardens have been imitated as readily as those of Nicole de Vésian, because, writes Louisa Jones, 'she has a feeling for space like musicians have a feeling for music.' Her finest work was La Louve, her own garden in Bonnieux, a hilltop village in the Luberon area of Provence.
On the narrow terraces around her Bonnieux home, Nicole de Vésian created her own very personal garden in a minimal but far from austere style, composed mainly of heath-land plants (varieties of thyme, lavender, rosemary, rockrose and box tree), in which she pruned all her plants to cushion shapes of varying, yet superbly proportioned sizes. Nicole de Vésian advises us to 'learn to listen to the soil.' Her plant sculptures are always somehow a reference to the wild hills of the surrounding countryside, reflecting an age-old Mediterranean landscape mindset, with a distinctly modern twist.
The work is also a tribute to Nicole de Vésian and her life. Her close friend, Louisa Jones, shares her own thoughts on the work of this atypical creator, accompanied by accounts from her friends and pupils: Christian Lacroix, the nursery owner Jean-Marie Rey, the landscape artists Arnaud Maurières, Éric Ossart and Marc Nucera, as well as the garden historians Roy Strong and John Brookes.
