Provence’s new culture club

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All eyes are on Marseille right now. France’s enfant terrible second city is shrugging off its nefarious patina, to take up the mantle of European Capital of Culture for 2013. Museums – the long-anticipated MuCEM, and the Villa Méditerranée – are finally open to the public, while events such as the Festival de Marseille and  the hugely popular TransHumance provide seasonal spectacles. If there were a time to go to Marseille, now is it.
But it’s not the only Provençal town seeking new beginnings. Cast your eye 100km eastwards, past the rugged limestone peaks of the Calanques and beyond the palm-tree-lined streets of fashionable favourite Hyères. Two hours from Marseille, at the tip of a snaking coastal road, lies a secret garden, a little Eden, known only to horticultural obsessives and blasé locals.
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Here is the Domaine du Rayol, a garden set in the sleepy little village of Rayol-Canadel-sur-Mer, the kind of place where stillness pervades only to be broken by the sound of toads croaking.  Designed by star gardener Gilles Clément in 1989, Le Jardin des Méditerranées is ostensibly a garden, but the word is inadequate– barely describing the lush, wild-seeming landscape, covered in extraordinary plants of every kind, which creep down the slopes to meet an aquamarine sea.
Anémochores ©  Louis Cargill, Domaine du Rayol
Anémochores ©  Louis Cargill, Domaine du Rayol
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“We are the garden of Mediterraneans,” Garden director Olivier Arnaud emphasises the plural as we talk on the balustrade of the Rayolet Villa, the grand old house which serves as an entrance. For this is really 13 gardens in one, each representing one of the many mediterranean climates around the world. California has it, Chile has it and South Africa does too. So do many others. Together, the gardens are a curious amalgam of adopted foreign plants, set down within a climate which mirrors their own, allowing all manner of things to grow here, from majestic-but-deadly eucalyptus trees to the smallest shrubs. It is a world away from the curated botanicals of London’s Kew.
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But, this previously overlooked nook is about to get a gentle awakening. For the garden is getting in on the cultural act. Taking its cue from neighbours (Hyeres runs a popular fashion festival every year), this year has seen the launch of a new festival and exhibition – Land Art: Art et Paysages au Jardin des Méditerranées. Out of the 100 artists, landscape architects and designers who applied to the brief – to use their skills to interpret and transform the gardens – seven were chosen, and the results at the festival’s opening in June are both surprising and uplifting.
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The entrance to the Domaine is dominated by Daniel Van de Veld’s Prendre La Tangent (Escaping), which takes the visually arresting form of a just-felled tree about to strike the main villa. Its trunk has been stripped of bark down to a dun colour that matches the house. Hollowed out, and roughly cut into segments, it’s like a broken stick of Brighton rock in an invisible wrapper, cracked but contained. Walk through the house on your way into the garden proper and on the terrace is its counterpart – a trunk telescope, through which you may peer out to sea. This sets the tone for the rest of the artworks – a deft balance of playful, arresting pieces that interpret the garden in thought-provoking ways, but that aren’t too overbearing.
Continuum ©  Louis Cargill, Domaine du Rayol
Continuum ©  Louis Cargill, Domaine du Rayol
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Indeed, as I walk through the garden, I dismiss another piece, Continuum! as the work of untidy gardeners leaving their buckets lying about. It’s only after stumbling over what seems to be the gazillionth set of these blue buckets, set into the ground at various intervals throughout the garden, that it occurs to me that this is one of the artworks. Made by Raphaël Caillens and Alexandre Lucas, it retraces the steps of a river which used to run through the garden, a simple but effective device for evoking thoughts about nature’s state of flux.
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I ask Arnaud why they’ve decided to hold this festival. “It’s a very culturally poor place, this area,” he says, gesturing out of the window at unseen villages beyond the garden. “Yes, in 40 to 50km, it’s a very poor cultural place. So for us it’s very important to have something here.” It’s not just about increasing visitor numbers, however. The Mediterranean climate means summer is a time of drought, when the garden is parched and dry. It’s crucial to the natural cycle, but means visitors over the July and August period expecting a colourful garden in bloom are two months too late.
Ouverture1 festival land art 2013 © Louis Cargill, Domaine du Rayol
Ouverture1 festival land art 2013 © Louis Cargill, Domaine du Rayol
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“There is no flower in summer, in Mediterranean gardens. So the idea is, you have botanical flowers in spring and cultural flowers in summer. We are looking for a different way to visit the garden.”

 The festival certainly provides that. Installations, tasked with highlighting the garden’s features, aren’t dropped in as foreign objects but spaced out over the Domaine’s 48 acres, installed in a way that complements their surroundings.
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The ambitious boat of L’abeille noire de Porquerolles (The black bees of Porquerolles), a collaboration between landscape architects Elinor Scarth and Etienne Haller, and furniture designers Hendzel+Hunt, exemplifies this. Having sailed it around the bay, it finds its final resting place in the garden, washed up at foot of a grand, overgrown staircase. Fashioned out of materials from the garden and local area such as cane for the hull and a cork bark interior to maintain buoyancy, it runs very much in keeping with Hendzel+Hunt philosophy of upcycling and using found treasure.
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Meanwhile Fleuve Rouge (Red River) by Alexandra Dior and Benoît Floquart is very different in feel. Lashings of bright red rope are intricately enmeshed within the trees of the forest as it follows the small river that winds through the garden. The contrasting colour and formal geometric repetition of lines serve to lend something of a heightened awareness of these organic surroundings, particularly when the crimson wires soar above the head, daring to be plucked like guitar strings.
Domaine du Rayol
Domaine du Rayol
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While the garden may no longer be in flower, it seems that, this year, the French Riviera is witnessing its own cultural bloom.
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by Jane Duru
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Land Art: Art et paysage au Jardin des Mediterranees runs until November 11, 2013. For more information, visit the website here
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Marseille City of Culture is on Facebook and can also be found on Twitter @MP2013 

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