“For me, Louis Benech is the Hemingway or the Orson Welles of plants, with an enormous personality larger than life” And sometimes, to create a bubble of greenery, you need to invent perspectives, which might mean planting fruit trees to hide unsightly electric poles or a car park. This, of course, demands a myriad of considerations, such as giving depth to a garden by balancing shadow and light. “I try to do things as naturally as possible,” Benech says, “to make life easier for the occupants.” Yet, beyond the illusion of simplicity, there’s more than meets the eye: his unique landscaping style combines straight lines and the geometry of French formalism with a seemingly untamed romantic beauty. However, nature is bound to present certain surprises, as shown in his enchanting new book, Louis Benech: Twelve Gardens Around the World by journalist Éric Jansen (a follow-up of Twelve French Gardens by the same author), where Benech discusses some of his recent projects in Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Greece, New Zealand, the United States and Morocco. As he discovered, working in new climates means that nothing can be left to chance. “At the hotel Dar Ahlam, in the Atlas Mountains, what I first planted there got frosted,” Benech says. “The Moroccan sun was hot, but it was colder than I thought, so I had to change the jasmine to honeysuckle and the orange trees into pomegranate trees.” For his breathtakingly lush gardens in Mataka, situated in the Bay of Islands in New Zealand, Benech created a labyrinth from indigenous plants and conceived a forest of tiny conifer trees. “It’s a garden of clipped shapes,” Benech explains, “but I didn’t do it for an aesthetic reason – just to resist the strong wind and get the roots established. My dream is that some day the gardeners will let them go free again to give a more unsophisticated look.” Benech is no stranger to confronting the most challenging of scenarios. He designed two private gardens owned by fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg, who Benech met through his friend Christian Louboutin. The urban garden is a tiny triangular sun-dappled rooftop deck in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, which he lined with long Mexican grass; the other, on von Fürstenberg’s country estate in Connecticut, he filled with roses, peonies, magnolia trees and glorious flowering fruit orchards. “For me, Louis Benech is the Hemingway or the Orson Welles of plants, with an enormous personality larger than life,” says Charles Carmignac, director of the contemporary art Carmignac Foundation on the idyllic Riviera island of Porquerolles. Having previously designed the family’s private garden in Normandy, Benech was commissioned to create a natural “non-garden” for the museum, where he used his botanical palette to combine native plants with blue jacarandas to remind art collector and financier Edouard Carmignac of his childhood in Peru. “When Benech learned from my father that rare orchids – serapias – grow wild on the island, he nearly fainted with joy,” Charles recalls with a smile. Visitors in the south of France may also catch a glimpse of a small, Benech-designed gem at Château La Coste near Aix-en-Provence, a contemporary-art centre and wine estate with a sculpture trail, three restaurants and one of the region’s most fêted hotels. Here, Benech says, he planted flowers and vegetables in the kitchen garden that reflect the shapes and primary colours used in the adjacent Jean Prouvé pavilions and a Calder sculpture. He also installed a unique watering system with a gravity flow through a gently sloping terrace. “One day, while Louis was here having lunch, I made a remark about the small flowering weeds surrounding our table,” says La Coste owner Patrick McKillen. “He looked at me and said, ‘Paddy, what are weeds? These are all God’s wonderful creations.’” In between other projects all around the globe, Benech says that he’s looking forward to returning to his favourite work-in-progress at an 18th-century castle in the northern Var with 400 hectares of grounds, owned by decorator Pierre Yovanovitch. Benech leans back in his chair, momentarily silent. “I knew this extremely gentle lady in Mallorca who went blind,” he reminisces. “I planted everything that was beautifully scented and she knew perfectly well where she was in the garden. I think I added joy to her life. Making people happy may be the best part of my job.” louisbenech.com • From top: an Alpine oasis Benech created for a chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland; Benech lent his Midas touch to the ten-hectare Petrothalassa estate, in Greece’s eastern Peloponnese 68 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
PHOTOS ERIC SANDER LOUIS BENECH: TWELVE GARDENS AROUND THE WORLD This new tome, in French only at the moment, explores a dozen of Benech’s more than 300 outdoor paradises, demonstrating how challenges both rural and urban were met with unique – and uniquely beautiful – solutions. gourcuff-gradenigo.com CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 69
