07:00 PM - 09:00 PM
About the event
Annual Garden Design Lecture
Louis Benech
Paris, France
French landscape designer Louis Benech is one of the world’s leading contemporary garden designers, with more than 300 private and public gardens to his credit, including the 1990s revamp of the Tuileries Garden in Paris and the 2015 reimagining of The Water Theatre grove at Versailles, reclaimed from a long dormant bosquet originally designed by André Le Nôtre in the late 17th century.
He came to garden design through a life-long preoccupation with horticulture. After studying law, he returned to his boyhood passion, working for Hillier in England, at the time Britain’s best-known nursery, before returning to France to look after the private gardens of such Normandy notables as Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. It was Bergé who pushed him to start a tiny garden design company in 1985.
Louis is known for an ability to create a genuinely harmonious relationship between his proposed scheme for a site and its natural and architectural setting, a unity achieved in no small part through the use of plants. “A good garden architect has to be a plants man or at least a good amateur, to play right in a world of plenty,” he told Italy’s La Stampa columnist Alain Elkann in 2015, “but he has also to be able to reduce his plant vocabulary when the context of the garden needs it.”
His gardens belong nowhere else but in the place where they are found. This is his genius and what makes his work stand out.
Lecture sponsored by Alka Pool Construction, the British Columbia Society of Landscape Architects, Golden Spruce Nurseries, Houston Landscapes, Light Resource, Polygon Homes, and Stone Event Imports.
Location: UBC Robson Square
49.282694, -123.121123
UBC Robson Square
800 Robson Street
V6Z 3B7 Vancouver, BC
Canada