Avant / pendant / après - pavillon de l’arsenal-paris

photos : Yann Monel

Exhibition from mid-May to end of September 2021

On the occasion of the exhibition The Beauty of a City, the Pavillon de l’Arsenal commissioned Wagon Landscaping to design an ephemeral garden to accompany the exhibition’s narrative. Conceived as a landscape story, the garden offers a journey through time in the history of Parisian garden plants, from the era of Alphand to the present day and towards a possible future.

The project is rooted in the continuity of a Parisian horticultural tradition in constant evolution. It reveals this heritage not as a fixed legacy, but as a living culture capable of adapting to contemporary uses and future climatic conditions. The garden thus weaves together plants of yesterday, today and tomorrow, showcasing the vegetal diversity that has shaped the identity of Paris’s green spaces while exploring the resources that could renew it.

Four major plant collections structure the layout. Species drawn from nineteenth-century ornamental know-how dialogue with plants that support contemporary urban biodiversity. They are joined by plants originating from other climates, able to adapt to ongoing climatic changes, as well as robust perennials suited to Paris’s poor and constrained urban soils.

Beyond its botanical display, the garden questions the relationships between plants, city stakeholders and inhabitants. It brings into tension aesthetic expectations, demands for cleanliness, fears of so-called invasive species, the growing demand for nature, water scarcity, rising maintenance costs and the impacts of climate change. The project advocates an open and pragmatic approach to the greening of Paris, based on broad and inclusive plant palettes, the acceptance of living systems in all their forms, an economy of means and a capacity for adaptation, as the foundation of a landscape strategy for the 21st century.

The garden is organized around four large plants collections:
* The traditional ornamental garden’s collections since the XIXth century;
* The hosts of biodiversity which strengthen biotopes in contemporary city;
* The climate transition companions, from other climates, which adapt to the Parisian climate evolving;
* The hard-bitten adapted to urban soils, which express richness of poor urban soils.

Commissioned Pavillon de l'Arsenal - Exhibition “the beauty of a city” at Pavillon de l'Arsenal