Portrait of a « musician of gardens »
As accurate as they may be, no formula alone can capture the richness of a figure who contributed so much, and in so many different ways, to the Art of Gardens. René Pechère was far more than a mere creator of gardens and green spaces — even ones as significant as the Botanique, the Mont des Arts or the 1958 World’s Fair. Teacher, historian, bibliophile, René Pechère was also, profoundly, a man of culture and transmission. He left us an entire array of tools for penetrating the heart of gardens. One of them — a Library unique in the world — today forms an integral part of our heritage. The reach of this work owes everything to the deep conviction that animated him. The art of gardens was, in his eyes, one of the most sensitive and most complete of all: olfactory, plastic, musical…
The garden contained, for him, all forms of expression, like a kind of artistic ideal. Far more than a stylistic exercise, the garden is conceived as a privileged place in which to enter into contact with oneself. ‘Humanised nature’ must lend itself to rest and to the walker’s journey towards a form of secret interiority. Hence that blend of discretion and lyricism, of harmony and rigour, that inhabited his creations.
Artist and craftsman, creator and scholar, René Pechère combined talents and visions that others tend to keep separate. It is there, no doubt, that his work finds its unity and its deeper meaning.
The Origins of a Passion
Originally, nothing predestined him to a career in gardens. His father, a paediatrician, had planned a medical career for him and enrolled him at the Decroly school. But the young Bruxellois encountered growth problems in adolescence. To remedy this, his father wished to send him into contact with nature. It was 1924: the fashion of the time would have sent him to Switzerland. His father instead chose to entrust him to Jules Buyssens, director of the City of Brussels gardens. There, the young man learned the unglamorous basics of the gardener’s craft… and gradually developed a taste for it. “I want to make gardens,” he told Jules Buyssens, who was himself looking for an heir. After training at the Horticulture School of Nancy, René Pechère took part in creating the Gardens of the 1935 Universal Exhibition in Brussels. Two years later, he followed this with another Exhibition held in Paris, which earned him his first successes and the attention of King Leopold III. Struck by his floral and restful composition, the King asked him to study the landscaping of his estate at Argenteuil.
Despite this promising start — already showing the determination and self-assurance that would characterise his professional life — René Pechère had to wait until the post-war period for his career to truly take off. He then created his own practice and developed, with a team of carefully chosen collaborators (M. Foërster, A. van M. de Lumen, Berry A. Jacqmotte, J. Boulanger-Français), a personal method based largely on attentive listening to the intimate needs of his clients. His reputation grew among a clientele drawn from Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Germany, through projects that allowed him to refine his art and forge privileged connections.
René Pechère and the 1958 World’s Fair
René Pechère was, however, most often captive to the demands made of him. The 1958 World’s Fair gave him the opportunity to move closer to his artistic ideal. In addition to the gardens of the Heysel site, he proposed — in the shadow of the Atomium — two conceptual gardens of a radically innovative character: the “Congolese Garden”, drawn from a free interpretation of traditional Kasai motifs, and the “Garden of the Four Seasons”, a renewed reading of Renaissance aesthetics. He was then 50. In this space inspired by the music of Vivaldi and the engravings of Vredeman de Vries, René Pechère led the visitor towards a total spectacle, combining sculpture and drawing, architecture and music. From that point on, René Pechère — already well established among garden enthusiasts — would impress his personality and style on a very great number of creations. In total, nearly 950 public and private works came to life under his pencil. It is impossible here to give a full account. Among the gardens still accessible in Brussels, let us mention such grand achievements as the “Mont des Arts” and the Botanique, or the more intimate “Labyrinth” and “Garden of the Heart” of the Maison Van Buuren (1968) — his most emblematic creation.
René Pechère: the Author and the Interpreter
The recurring motifs that compose René Pechère’s gardens — like immutable grammatical rules — are many. “Plants,” he declares in his Grammaire des Jardins, “are words that must be arranged like a beautiful phrase; the paths and landings are the rhythms of a cadence…”. For him, the garden is truly the place “where man marks his place in nature.” Some have often reduced his style to a form of neo-Versailles art. It is clear that René Pechère is anything but a man of rupture. His aesthetic choices are the fruit of a reasoned reflection on the place of man in nature. For Pechère, as he explains in his writings, it is man who sets the measure of the garden. The classical codes, which he employs without servility, are the natural expression of this encounter between man and nature. If this credo — rooted in a very coherent worldview — closes him off to certain avant-gardes, René Pechère nonetheless demonstrates, throughout his career, a remarkable spirit of openness and eclecticism. Witness his “Congolese Garden”, born of a six-month study trip (1957) to the former Belgian colony, his passion for historic gardens, and the many travels that nourished his creations. Here, he draws inspiration from a 17th-century Scottish garden at Edzell for a chequerboard garden; elsewhere, he borrows techniques from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to create the suspended garden of the Mont des Arts, above three levels of car parks. This subtle connoisseur of Oriental gardens was keenly aware of the ravages of time and the contingency of his art. Wishing to ensure the longevity of his creations, he always privileged the layout over the plantings — “for it is the layout that will remain”. Comparable to a musician, René Pechère conceived his plans as canvases that would endure, whatever the future interpreters might choose — ash or boxwood, roses or grasses.
The Memory of Gardens
The question of the memory and conservation of gardens runs through his personal work and shapes his aesthetic choices. It also determines the action he undertook in favour of historic gardens from 1968. At that time, few were those who accorded gardens a genuine heritage value.
Faced with the threat hanging over certain historic gardens, René Pechère committed himself and brought the cause before UNESCO. It was under his impetus, after the war, that an international committee on historic gardens and sites was established. Its mission: to study, rediscover, catalogue, conserve and restore the gardens of the past on the same footing as buildings. They also constitute an irreplaceable source of inspiration for future projects. In this spirit, he participated in drafting the Florence Charter — the counterpart of the Venice Charter for architects — and undertook, as a pioneer, the work of a restorer. He collaborated on the restoration of Beloeil, the Maison d’Érasme, Seneffe and the gardens of Het Loo in the Netherlands, among others.
A Profession as Legacy
René Pechère was quick to recognise the singularity of his path. Throughout the 94 years of his long life, he wished to share its most significant lessons. He devoted himself to an intense career as a lecturer. Through visits, colloquia and missions entrusted to him, René Pechère became, for his peers, an international reference. He also taught at La Cambre and at the American Schools of Fontainebleau, where he trained his students in the reading of space and landscape.
His Grammaire des Jardins (1987), which has become an essential classic of the genre, is in some ways the fruit of this teaching. This unclassifiable book is at once treatise and narrative. This unique testimony to his creative journey draws professional lessons for the benefit of amateurs and professionals alike. The “old Belgian master”, as E. Orsenna calls him, thus laid the foundations necessary for the endurance of the profession he had himself learned. By giving others access to his experience as a “gardener” — the only title he claimed — Pechère perpetuated a literary tradition on the art of gardens from which he had himself drawn inspiration. Throughout his life, out of taste and a passion for reading, he assembled thousands of books: novels, practical guides, classics of garden literature (De Ganay, Le Rouge, André), botanical treatises, philosophical collections (Alain!)… Others in his position might have given little thought to preserving this unity or passing it on to successors. René Pechère, on the contrary, wished that everyone, throughout the world, could have access to his collection. It was thus that the René Pechère Library came into being in 1988. The Brussels-Capital Region has since worked to keep it alive and help it grow… like a garden. In 2004, its management was entrusted to the Comité René Pechère by Madame Solvay de la Hulpe.
Creator, man of culture and of sharing, René Pechère, like other Belgian artists of his generation (one thinks of Hergé or Simenon), brought nobility to an art that was once considered minor. He wrote himself: “There are indeed all sorts of pianists — there can just as well be all sorts of gardeners!”