LE MIROIR DE CIRCE (CIRCE’S MIRROR)

Garden designed by group of students from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure du Paysage de Versailles-Marseille: Margaux Tissot, Arthur Lafrux and Olivier Bruillot. 

Produced in partnership with the Campus Vert d'Azur, the landscaper Vincent Suzanne of " Trambaud Paysage et Naturellement " and Chloé Jausas, Campus Vert d'Azur apprentice.

Circe's Mirror is a point of collection, knowledge, and projection. In Ancient Greece, myths and legends were the pillars of culture and knowledge of Western civilisation widely fed and spread from the Mediterranean Sea to the East and Asia. Today, as our civilisation evolves, so do the societal and environmental challenges.

Circé's mirror seeks to connect with a temporal perspective, to bring back these myths and legends around the theme of nature and its uses to guide humans. While looking at the past, it also projects perspectives for the future, on the rediscovery of plants and their benefits, but also on the subject of women, which is not often mentioned. The figure of Circe, the first magician to have walked on the soil of the Mediterranean basin, runs through the story of this garden. As we stroll towards her waters, nestled in the centre, in the intimacy, reflection between earth and sky, conscious and unconscious, but also past, present and future, we come across the different essences needed for life, for well-being, but also for the beliefs of the peoples of yesteryear.

The garden, divided into 5 large gardens, is meant to be a collection of essences with various properties: Physical afflictions, mental afflictions, remedies and antidotes, magical plants, and, at the centre of the garden, the woman's garden, a heritage dating back more than two millennia, passed on in the form of a centrality, a foundation of this world. To connect these spaces, the Odes Way sets up a path of essences with mythological and Asian undertones, as a path that leads to the journey, to grace, knowledge, and the history of the men and women of this world.