Jardins écologiques avant la lettre ? Lectures de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, George Sand et Hermann Hesse à la lumière de Gilles Clément

Abstract

The art of gardens, under the guise of an equitable collaboration between culture and nature, most often shows uniquely anthropocentric concerns: the human being bends nature to his will in order to satisfy his aesthetic or emotional needs, and takes little account of the rhythm, behavior and diversity of the flora and vegetation themselves. However, long before the “ecological turn” of the 1970s, there are literary works which, in their representations of gardens, do not content themselves with applying the horticultural fashions of the moment, but evince a kind of ecological awareness that far exceeded the concerns of their time: this is what a careful study of some texts by Rousseau, Goethe, Sand and Hesse reveals. In these texts, the solidarity of the writer with the “genius of nature” (Gilles Clément) takes different forms: it sometimes manifests itself through discreet, at first sight only incidental, comments by a protagonist; elsewhere through an indirect critique (through narrative irony) of the denaturation of nature; in yet other instances through the concrete proposal of a new art of living in gardens, and perhaps even of a new art of living of gardens.