Le petit livre: Gilles Clément’s paper garden

Abstract

The Garden in Motion is a concept that was developed by Gilles Clément in the early 1980s as the result of the experimentation conducted in his garden-house, La Vallée. Clément’s interest in promoting this garden archetype based on managing neglected land led him to write a number of works in order to explain the conceptual underpinnings of his model, with the ultimate aim of having them published. From the writing of the first manuscripts, dating from 1984, to the first edition of “Le jardin en movement” in 1991, he produced a series of different documents that would form the basis of the text that was finally published. It was a long process in which Clément not only had to fully develop his ideas but also to overcome the difficulties involved in finding a company to publish what he called his ‘petit livre’. The aim of this article is to show the creative process behind Clément’s book and its relationship with the creative process of building his garden, while endeavouring to reply to the question of whether it is possible to establish an equivalence between both processes. This is made possible through the analysis of documents kept by Clément in his personal archive, some of which have never been published.