Sensation of nature

"We are an iridescent chaos. I come before my subject; I lose myself there". Paul Cézanne

The garden designed by Hugues Peuvergne is the result of various reflections on the awareness of nature. "Encourage people to watch nature, make them want to unite with it, wake to the sensation of nature. Through this silent and tranquil journey, learn again to listen to moments of pure emotion," says the landscape gardener Hugues Peuvergne, winner of the 2000 Chaumont-sur-Loire International Garden Festival, with his "gardens of straw."
After going through a bamboo door whose bright colours contrast with the green of the undergrowth, visitors follow a narrow path overlooked by Olivier Beaudoin's driftwood totems. These figures, portraits of characters and witnesses to our way of being, are a tribute to the guardians of this place: the gardener Vallier and the canal-master whom Cézanne often used as models. These wooden faces, both rough and simple, invite us to silence and to a deeper observation of nature. The fresh, soft murmur of the fountains recall the canal which Cézanne loved to walk along, at the bottom of the garden. Freed from your sensory bearings, you can develop your sense of observation and see more details than was possible at first glance. This is when the gardener's art will caress you, gently and in harmony with the surroundings: euphorbia, acanthus, Japanese anemone, box and honeysuckle offer their perfumes and colours to all those who can listen to moments of pure emotion.
Cézanne said: "In art especially, everything is theory developed and applied in contact with nature. To see nature is to draw out the character of your model. Painting is not slavishly copying the object: it is grasping a harmony between many relationships, transposing them into a scale of your own, developing them with a new, original approach," the same one as used by Hugues Peuvergne to show that "art is a harmony parallel to nature."