Synopsis
Inspiring Claude Monet in 1893 when he painted a series of beautiful paintings of the d’Aval arch, the town of Etretat worked its’s magic on garden designer Alexandre Grivko of Il Nature Landscape Design when he visited the town nearly a century later.
In 2015 Grivko decided with his friend and business partner Mark Dumas to swap their flat in Paris for the beautiful town of Etretat with its dramatic coast line and elemental landscape. Where they set about creating what Grivko describes as a ‘neo-futuristic garden with an experimental artistic laboratory’.
The garden perches on a precipitous cliff overlooking the wild Atlantic coast and is spread over 8 acres, divided into several smaller gardens and areas for different works of art. What unifies the space is the recurring planting of Buxus sempervirens, Phillyrea angustifolia, Taxus baccata and Eleagnus x ebbingei all clipped, sculpted and shaped into many and various shapes, sizes, forms and hedges connected by a network of terraced paths and steps.
In the Les Jardins Emotion, sculpted ‘madeleine-shaped’ mounds of box encircle large grey heads facing skywards created by the Spanish artist Samuel Salcedo. Chanting voices whisper the word ‘Art’ in 100 different languages from the sound installation hanging from trees in the garden of Le Jardin des bruits de la nature by artist Sergey Catran. Clipped columns and arches of Taxus baccata mimic the rock formation and coast line. A family of willow figures ‘Tree Hugger’ stream down the hillside in Jardin des Etreintes et des Arbres and in the Le Jardin Elements of dramatic sculpted spirals of Phillyrea angustifolia, Wiktor Szostalo’s twig statue of Claude Monet is poised at his easel.
Alexandre Grivko and his team of architects and landscape designers at Il Nature have created a truly unique and spectacular garden here in Etretat, a stunning blend and celebration of design and art with the assistance of the mother of all design, mother nature.
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