W a hen French landscape designer Louis Benech describes any one of the 400-odd gardens that he has created, the first thing he does is close his eyes. His inner vision – whether it’s a tiny island of greenery in residential Barcelona or a sprawling clifftop estate facing the sea in New Zealand – is so ablaze with detail that he will give you a full account of colours, atmosphere and names of rare blooms. Step by step, as he leads you through every twist and turn of a garden path, his conjuring is no less than magical, sprinkled with anecdotes and wry observations that capture the spirit of the place. Known for his passion for everything that springs from the earth, Benech is no ordinary plantophile. Dressed in a plaid shirt and braces, he has the disarming allure of a gentleman farmer and the panache of an unencumbered entrepreneur. “As a child, I was fascinated by trees,” Benech says. An autodidact whose encyclopedic knowledge of plants earned him the renown of a botanical whiz kid, he graduated with a degree in law only to train to become a gardener, opting for a threeyear stint at the Hillier nurseries in Hampshire, England. “The other part of my story is that my father is an architect and we visited tons of places, from cathedrals to every place Le Corbusier ever built. I was brought up in a culture focused on the organisation and distribution of space, which helps me unconsciously in my work.” Today, at 64, Benech has carved out an international reputation with commissions that range from his first foray as a landscape designer – the 1990 renovation of Paris’s Tuileries Gardens along with gardener Pascal Cribier and architect François Roubaud – to a contemporary reinvention of the Water Theatre Grove at the Château de Versailles in 2014. Add to that a multitude of private vegetal Edens for the likes of Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent, François and Maryvonne Pinault, Guy and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, Stavros Niarchos and French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy. “I first met Pierre Bergé when I was working at a garden centre in Normandy, where I worked after I’d left England,” says Benech. “He came with friend – I had no idea who – and they wanted to know about roses. It was closing time, so I took them to my little mobile home and offered them some tea and Pierre said, ‘You should come visit Yves and me at Château Gabriel’, which was about ten miles away from the nursery.” During that time, perhaps the greatest influence on his life, Benech says, was Loel Guinness, the British politician and philanthropist who, back in 1985, gave Benech his very first job as a gardener at the Guinness estate in Normandy. “He was a charming old gentleman who taught me a lot and was sort of my grandfather in many ways. I would say that the most glamorous people I worked for were at the beginning, all through Loel.” Now, 36 years later, what qualities does Benech attribute to his worldwide success? “I think of the plants and how I can stage them theatrically in their surroundings. I try to be simple and make things the most convenient for the type of life of each place.” As an example, Benech cites his work in the lush oasis gardens of boutique hotel Dar Ahlam, near Ouarzazate, Morocco, where the swimming pool was expressly designed to avoid viewing the comings and goings of the hotel staff. › XXXXXXXXXXXX 66 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
PHOTOS ERIC SANDER Clockwise from left: Benech in the garden he designed for the 18th-century Château de Pange in Lorraine; Benech masterminded a luscious gardenscape for French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Palais de la Zahia in Marrakech; the Benech-designed gardens at Paris’s National Archives CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 67
