Louis Benech: The Pastural Poet
From Avignon to the Auvergne and Versailles to Villandry, there is barely a corner of France that has not profited from the elegant interventions of the Paris based garden designer Louis Benech. Well known for his impeccable understanding of space and a knowledge of plants sans pareil Benech’s horticultural odyssey had auspicious beginnings.
A life Peppered with People and Plants
He credits his two grandmothers, both of whom he claims were ‘keen but not very good gardeners’ and his mother for nurturing his early talent. With a strewing of benedictions along the way from old Madame Mallet at Les Bois des Moutiers and Jelena de Belder in Belgium. Aged 7 young Louis was sowing nasturtium seeds on his paternal grandmother’s Paris balcony ready to be transplanted to her potager in the Pays Basque where her bedroom overlooked a park; ‘il y avait un vallon, tres joli, avec un ferme posée a l’est’. The garden of his maternal grandmother was full of ‘old pear trees, which I always loved, only pear trees, and some Iris unguicularis that she had transported from her childhood home in the South of France’.
These snippets of conversation with Louis sum up a life of acute observation where memories are peppered with place, the contours of the land, architecture and, always, plants.
Master of Modernism and Timelessness
The French maestro of garden design has a client list that runs the gamut from départements to divas, he has worked on countless monuments historiques with the ruins of Jumièges currently on his drawing board. Louis is also the go to person when the work of Russell Page or Achille Duchène needs sensitive remodelling to accommodate 21st century life. He is a past master at practicality and when congratulated on some beautiful creation tends to brush compliments aside with the retort that it was just the practical outcome rather than an artistic one. The extraordinarily beautiful canal in a Greek fretwork motif he delineated to join ponds on a project in the Sologne is a case in point, a nod to a device he had seen on old maps of the estate but dismissed by him as ‘more to do with the circulation of the water than the design’. To everyone else it seems a masterful marriage of modernism and timelessness.
There is a Benechian style but it is not a wildly obvious one, there is little repetition in his gardens, his response to scale and the situations he faces being so varied. In many places clearing and simplifying take precedence over adding.
The Blend of Practicality and Poetry
As Louis carries an expansive lexicon of horticulture in his head each situation can be met with nimble agility whether he is conjuring a sense of woodland privacy for an hôtel particulier in the 7ème arrondissement with a brightening understorey of variegated cornus and cherry blossom or creating an arboretum of rare oaks from acorns. Louis Benech has cut a discreet but remarkable swathe through French design like the piercing vistas he has orchestrated in his work, earth and sky meeting in a particular Louis Benech blend of practicality and poetry.
