le Chant du Sel / the Song of Salt
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Where:
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Resilient Garden
Chaumont-Sur-Loire, France
2023
Domaine de Chaumont
Felix De Rosen
Bruno Derozier
Chaumont-Sur-Loire, France
2023
Domaine de Chaumont
Felix De Rosen
Bruno Derozier
The Domaine de Chaumont issues an open-call competition each year for the design of conceptual, boutique gardens oriented around a theme. The theme of 2023’s competition was
Resilience.
Our design addressed the theme through the issue of sea-level rise
and changing soil chemistry as saltwater intrudes further onto our
shores. In response to this, we proposed a garden planted entirely of halophytes - plants tolerant of salt. We teamed up with a horticulturalist from Ile De
Re - an island just off the Atlantic coast of France known for
its salty marsh landscape where the crystals are harvested - to provide us with a bespoke palette of halophytes, and the expertise to procure, install, and sustain them on our site.
Our garden confronts the consequences of the anthropocene as new opportunities for environmental reconciliation, attempting to demonstrate how solutions can be beautiful and playful without compromising on function.
The garden’s central basin represents the ocean, surrounded by planted mounds and a continuous
groundcover of tumbled glass recycled from the waste glass of a French glassware
factory. 12 metric tons of glass are spread across the site,
unifying the basin, mounds, and circulation area into a continuous
surface. The uncertain boundary between these zones creates the impression of a flooded walkway and tension of whether the water may continue to rise. Glass was chosen to evoke the crystalline structure of
the interface of sand and salt where rising sea level poses its risks.
The mounds are exaggerated by vegetation
which grows in height from the edges to the peaks. This strategically
screens visitors from the basin and negotiates their relationship with
the water as they circulate around the site, obscuring and revealing different scenes.
The plants come from two different types of saline ecosystems: dunes and wetlands. The dune-dwelling plants are adapted to sandy substrates and high winds, while the wetland-dweling plants are adapted to saturated substrates with a lot of organic matter. The planting plan allocates the plants according to their proximity to the basin, positioning wetland plants on the interior and dune plants on the exterior.
