le Jardin De 100 ans -Passendale (Belgique)

The “Hundred-Year Garden” evokes the long time required for a rich and living nature to be rebuilt on territories deeply scarred by war. One hundred years ago, one of the most violent battles of the First World War took place at Passchendaele. Today, the site is a place of remembrance, marked by commemorative gardens dedicated to the different belligerents. Wagon was commissioned to design the memorial garden for the French soldiers.

The project deliberately chooses to situate the garden within the forest that has recolonised the battlefield over the past century. This spontaneous woodland, the result of a hundred years of slow regeneration, carries within it the memory of the soil and the destroyed landscape. For those able to read the site, this temporal depth remains perceptible in the very structure of the forest.

Some senescent trees are cut at mid-height. These standing trunks evoke the shattered silhouettes of trees blown apart by bombardments, while also serving as essential habitats for biodiversity. The understorey is gardened with restraint, allowing a clearing to emerge like a well of light. Dead wood is left on the ground to host insects, small mammals and fungi, discreet agents of material transformation.

Spontaneous seedlings are protected and accompanied. They ensure the future regeneration of the forest and convey a central message of the project: in a place marked by destruction, the return of life becomes a form of tribute. As the forest rebuilds itself, it magnifies memory and anchors remembrance within a living dynamic.

« Il ne s’était pas du tout soucié de la guerre. Il avait imperturbablement continué à planter. »

L’homme qui plantait des arbres, Jean Giono

Conception/réalisation Wagon-landscaping, une commande : Art & Jardins Hauts-de-France