Door
JAN WOUDSTRA University of
Sheffield, Department of Landscape, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK
The artist and philosopher
Louis Guillaume le Roy (b. 1924) has made a considerable impact on
garden culture in Western Europe since the late 1960s. Introducing a
new definition for wild gardening, using the spoils of the modern
throwaway society as a starting point for both creative and natural
processes. Le Roy’s Natuur Uitschakelen
Natuur Inschakelen (Switching off
nature, switching on nature), first published in 1973, appeared a year
after the disturbing environmental predictions by the Club of Rome. It
brought the concept of an ecologically sustainable society to a larger
public and proposed a richly varied and creative counter culture as an
antidote to existing monocultural agriculture and inhuman architecture
of modern cities. Since then, he has been one of the main proponents of
the movement in changing attitudes with respect to greenspace and
landscape design, also questioning traditional maintenance of gardens
and public landscape. His aim was to work with the citizens in order to
create systems of richly varied artificial ecosystems with small-scale
agriculture that connected different cities. One of the early projects,
started in the late 1960s, was the Kennedylaan in Heerenveen, the
Netherlands, where he worked with the local population and school
children. It transformed a narrow strip of land of about one mile
length into an area with rich artificial undulations and a wide range
of characters. It received international acclaim and became the
prototype for the work that followed. Since then, he has worked in
France, Belgium and the Netherlands where his projects have received
both fame and notoriety because they required the official bodies to
relinquish greenspace to the citizens. It was this conflict with
officialdom, which has dominated all his public work and has ultimately
led to such projects being abolished. Despite and probably owing to
this, le Roy’s popularity in the Germanic countries grew, stimulated by
a translation of his book in 1978. He has been a frequent lecturer
there in the academic circuit, becoming an Honorary Professor at
Carolina University, Braunschweig, in 1989. In the meanwhile, le Roy has
continued to work at an experimental garden in Mildam, not far from his
home in Oranjewoud. Here he has spent the last thirty years on the
foundations of what he has referred to as an eco-cathedral, which
encompasses and highlights his theories. He has defined this as an
‘environmental rural or urban structure that develops towards a climax
endlessly in space and time, and is based on co-operation between
people, plants and animals’. Le Roy has set the cultural and natural
processes in motion, and he expects that future generations will
continue the creation of changing and flexible structures. Over the years, le Roy has
remained a public figure and his work has been variously discussed in
the popular and professional press. Yet, up to now there has been no
publication in the English press that has done him justice. There was a
mention of him in Allan Ruff’s Holland and the
Ecological Landscapes (Stockport, 1979) and
an article by Sandra Higgins in the Architects’ Journal, CLXXXIII/6 (1986),
but nothing else has appeared. The present publication is a compilation
of a series of essays by different authors on le Roy and his work,
interspersed by short chapters containing selected quotes from his
written work. This provides an excellent flavour of le Roy’s theory and
work, and forms a good basis for future research. Unlike some of his
controversial British and French contemporaries working with landscape,
such as Ian Hamilton Finlay and Bernard Lassus, le Roy has not yet
found his biographer. This bilingual English and Dutch book therefore
fills an important gap. It is a beautifully presented publication with
a remarkable layout, illustrated with magnificent photographs of the
experimental garden in Mildam.