Gilles Clément: The Gardener Who Broke Down the Walls
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
October 6, 1943
On this day, Gilles Clément was born — the French gardener, agronomist, designer, botanist, entomologist, and writer whose ideas have made him the darling of philosophers and the occasional scourge of traditionalists. If the gardens of Versailles represent control and order, then Clément’s gardens whisper rebellion.
At La Vallée — his modest property, where he built a hut from local stone and timber — Gilles began to experiment. From this quiet corner of the French countryside emerged three concepts that have rippled across the gardening world: the garden in movement (Jardin en Mouvement), the planetary garden (Jardin planétaire), and the third landscape (tiers paysage).
The garden in movement acknowledges a truth most gardeners secretly resist: plants are not static ornaments but restless travelers. Seeds scatter, roots wander, and the gardener must decide — to permit or to police. Vita Sackville-West would have raised an eyebrow here, recalling her own White Garden at Sissinghurst, where foxgloves insisted on sowing themselves in disobedient corners. Lady Whistledown, on the other hand, would surely have quipped: “It seems the plants have begun their own promenade, and no chaperone in sight.”
The planetary garden carries this vision further, reminding us that no plot, however fenced, is truly enclosed. Birds, ants, mushrooms — none acknowledge our boundaries. “The enclosure was always an illusion,” Gilles writes, “a garden is bound to be a planetary index.” In other words, your garden is not yours alone; it is stitched into the fabric of the earth itself. Sobering, perhaps, for those who fancy their plots private kingdoms.
And then there is Clément’s most provocative notion: the third landscape. Borrowing from Abbé Sieyès’ “third estate” of the French Revolution, Gilles redefined it as the spaces left out of management — the derelict edges and abandoned scraps: highway shoulders, railway embankments, riverbanks, fallow fields. These neglected places, despised by planners, are in fact reservoirs of biodiversity. Misfit gardens, if you will. A Whistledown aside might read: “How deliciously scandalous that the weeds along the roadside may one day outshine the parterres of the great châteaux.”
For Gilles Clément, the garden is not simply a place of order, but of intermingling. He once wrote:
“[A garden] is territory where everything is intermingled: flowers, fruit, vegetables.
I define the garden as the only territory where man and nature meet, in which dreaming is allowed.
It is in this space that man can be in a utopia that is the happiness of his dreams.”
And so, dear reader, Gilles Clément reminds us that the garden is not a stage set to be endlessly dusted and preened, but a living dialogue. A utopia, yes, but one that will not sit still for us. Perhaps the real scandal is this: the happiest gardens are the ones that escape our control.
