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The incremental garden

A private research ground in the Creuse valley

2014 - ongoing
Cuzion - FR
Private

Program: Research garden / ecological laboratory
Area: 1600 m²
Status: In-Situ Research / Private

The incremental garden is a 1,600m² private garden in the Creuse valley in France, maintained since 2014. It is the site where the practice's hypotheses about soil, planting, and material behaviour are tested, where things fail without professional consequence, and where the gap between design time and ecological time becomes most directly measurable.

The garden has gone through several phases, each corresponding to a different research question. Starting from a manucured lawn, an early near-zero-maintenance period gave way to a indigenous plants and habitats, the soil slowly recovering after years of impovrishment. Since few years, a progressive planting aims at establishing a low-density food-forest, juxtaposed with spontaneous shrubs and trees

Work done here feeds directly into commissions: material behaviour, maintenance cycles, ecological succession, the spatial qualities of a landscape allowed to become something other than what it was designed to be.

This incremental garden is where the practice learns what it cannot learn from drawings.

Practicing and experimenting with maintenance, materials and furnitures

The many shaped of the productive planting palette

Snapshots