Louis XIV, the Sun King, shaped the French approach to nature in the 17th century. Lawns were to be immaculate, bushes trimmed to perfection and flowerbeds made ornate in a display of gardening grandeur designed to illustrate his country’s sophistication.
Now, however, the legacy of the king and that of his renowned landscape gardener, André Le Nôtre, who created the park at Versailles, is being questioned by left-wing ecologists adopting a British-style laissez-faire approach to weeding and pruning.
Green mayors claim that their naturalistic parks and prairie gardens help to preserve biodiversity, while also mitigating the rise in temperatures caused by global warming. However, the issue is divisive, as Robin Gervais, a 33-year-old landscape gardener from Lyon, discovered when he decided to spend his summer cutting back some of the greenery sprouting across the city.
Gervais removed weeds from steps in a public square, pruned the overgrown Virginia creeper on a railway embankment and used his strimmer to tidy up a car park. He filmed himself, posted the videos on social media and prompted a political row. Rightwingers applauded him and said he should be paid. Leftwingers expressed anger, describing him as a “criminal”.
“I really wasn’t expecting these sorts of reactions,” Gervais said. “I have been attacked by the ecologists and supported by the right, but I’m not in either camp.”
He said he had weeded the steps because they were unsafe, cut back the creeper because it was blocking the pavement and tackled the car park because “I regularly went past it and thought it did not look great”.
Gervais won widespread backing on the internet. Many said he was making up for the council’s failure to keep parks, gardens and streets tidy. However, his detractors said he had failed to understand that the days of Louis XIV-style gardening were over.
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Pierre Athanaze, the deputy chairman of Greater Lyon council, rejected claims that plants were out of control because of a reduction in the city’s gardening budget. He said it had implemented a deliberate policy of letting them grow.
“People who are nostalgic for roads without a blade of grass in them have nothing except the nostalgia,” he said. “The management of green space is completely different now. It is criminal to continue to manage them as we did 30 years ago.
“We have to consider this as an opportunity to have flowers and grasses to reduce heat on the ground. It is also going to help the biodiversity, [to help] bees and butterflies to live.”
Municipal gardens had been left untended on purpose, the council said
ROBIN GERVAIS
Officials accused Gervais of cutting back bushes at the wrong time of year and of intervening without authorisation on council-owned land.
However, Jean-Michel Aulas, the former chairman of Lyon football club who is likely to be a centre-right candidate in the mayoral elections next year, said : “How can a city like Lyon be reduced to letting a lone citizen carry out this task, [then] accusing him of vandalism rather than thanking him.”
Gervais said he understood the need to encourage biodiversity, but believed that a dogmatic approach could prove counterproductive. “If you make a pathway through a wilderness or a prairie, you showcase it better and people will want to learn more about it,” he said.
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