Two gardens of peace dedicated to Danish, Czech and Slovakian soldiers who fought in World War I are being unveiled in France on Friday 11 November, the 104th anniversary of Remembrance Day. They are part of Gardens of Peace, an international memorial landscape project.
Gardens of Peace was started in 2018 by a cultural association, Art & Jardins – Hauts-de-France, in partnership with the French Ministry of the Armed Forces and local councils.
It brings together landscape architects representing the multitude of countries that took part in the Great War from 1914-1918.
They have been invited to design gardens next to the existing memorials in northern and eastern France, as well as in Belgium, forming a green trail of remembrance.
New gardens for 2022
The international project has 33 gardens, 20 of them already completed. Art & Jardins says there will be 40 gardens by 2025. Twelve gardens were planted in the first year, in time for the centennial commemorations of World War I in 2018.
This year, on 11 November, two newly completed gardens will be opened to the public.
In the northern French town of Braine, a Danish garden called “Border Land” has been designed by Rikke Thiirmann Thomsen and Elzelina Van Melle.
It features a path made with 6,490 bricks brought specially from Denmark as a tribute to the Danish soldiers conscripted by force into the German army and who died in combat.
In the Ardennes in eastern France, the Czech and Slovak “White Mist” will be opened in the town of Vouziers. Designed by SLLA Architects and Atelier Divo, it is located next to the military cemetery of Chestres, which holds the bodies of 282 Czechoslovakian soldiers.
The trunks and branches of the 282 birch trees planted in the new garden form a white haze reminiscent of the blindness caused by poison gas on the battlefield, according to the designers’ description.
“A garden is a way of celebrating life in a poetic way, a beautiful way,” Gilbert Fillinger, the director of Art & Jardins told RFI.
Fillinger says the idea behind the garden project is to encompass a large notion of what peace means – not just in terms of the connection to war history, but to humanity as a whole.
A garden represents seasons, and human life cycles and is different from a monument or a cemetery, he says, because “it is focused on the here and now and looks to the future rather than the past”.
Mission for peace
The gardens are places of tranquillity where families can come and picnic, reabeingd, walk and learn as well as remember.
There is also an environmental scope to the project, Fillinger explains, underlining the toll climate change is taking on the planet. The gardens have been designed to take into account reduced water supplies, for example, and prioritised the planting of native species rather than imported ones.
The scope of the Great War and its impact across the globe is reflected by the sheer number of countries represented in the peace garden project. Besides France, Germany and England, there is Belgium, the former Czechoslovakia, Canada, China, Italy, Ireland, Morocco, New Zealand, Portugal, Scotland and Wales.
Tenders have already been put out for future gardens which will be designed by countries and regions that were once colonies of France and Britain, such as Algeria, Tunisia, India and Madagascar, as well as sub-Saharan Africa and former Indochina.
There is even a joint Russian-Italian garden due to be opened in Metz in 2023.
“Celebrating peace is a necessity; recalling the irresponsibility of governments and the consequences that this can have for a nation, a continent, and the whole world,” Fillinger notes.
“Unfortunately, we can see this today with the return of war to the European continent; the same mistakes keep repeating themselves.”
This theme is perhaps best illustrated by the title of the Franco-British garden in Flesquières, “Do not take Peace for Granted”.
As the conflict rages on between Russia and Ukraine, Fillinger hopes more than ever that humans will be able to leave war behind and find healing.
He is keen to point out that even if gardens represent life, resilience and the capacity for growth, these things are also fragile and must be protected.
