Picture by Antoine Thevenet
As part of the International garden festival in Amiens, SYLVA & COSMOS Landschap were asked to design a garden looking at the future of the specific landscape of the Hortillonages: the peat landscape faced with the challenges of the intensification of human activity.
1000 years : a garden of peat is a walk through time, where visitors can discover the various stages of the slow evolution of the peatland landscape: an ecologically valuable environment, a heritage site, but also a territory threatened by urbanization and climate change.
It is a garden of ecological succession: ponds with their aquatic plants, quaking bogs with mosses, meadows of colorful annuals, cushion-like peatland forests — all the way to the landscape’s renewal through the death of a tree and its pioneering recolonization. It is a cyclical landscape, where each biotope hosts its own specific flora and fauna.
Pictures by Antoine Thevenet
Visitors are invited to follow a narrow, elevated path in a slow and respectful approach to a landscape that is both ancient and extremely fragile. Despite urban and environmental pressures, this landscape is not doomed to disappear — it has the capacity to regenerate, provided it is given the time.
Project Data
'1000 years : a peat garden' is part of the International Garden Festival – Hortillonnages Amiens
Location
Amiens, France
Information & access
Garden design
Design & Construction
2024-2025
In collaboration with
This project is the result of a collaboration and co-design between Charlotte van der Woude - Cosmos Landschap, Jean-Francois Gauthier - SYLVA Landscape and several partners:
-Paul Casteleijn Hoveniers, Marjolijn Guldemond, Sander Huijzer, Jörgen Smit and Frans van der Horst for the boardwalks.
-Paul Casteleijn Hoveniers, Christophe Froment (Nova-flore), Marilu de Bies and Antoine Thevenet for the garden.
-Liesbeth Verhoeven - HelkantPlant for the floating islands.
Copyright
Photos by Antoine Thevenet.
