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A Vast Circle

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Since june 2022

The project

The Saline royale, formerly a salt factory registered on the UNESCO World Heritage List, is reinventing itself with a new landscape design, the shape of which is inspired by the Ideal City of Chaux imagined by its architect, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, in the 18th century.

LThe Vast Circle consists of 30 gardens covering 13 hectares inspired by the work of landscape artist Gilles Clément. Here, the gardeners observe and accompany nature, rather than trying to domesticate it, in order to promote diversity.

At the heart of the Circle

Since June 2022, the Saline royale has enriched its five-hectare visitor trail with a landscape design by the company Mayot & Toussaint and by Gilles Clément , which includes :

The 30 gardens were designed as a series of moods created by the different plants to discover seeds that travel, move and sleep, to walk in the shade of the trees, to walk barefoot on leaves, humus and pebbles, or to stop and contemplate the sky in the time garden or in the giant hammock in the garden of dormancy.

In the second semi-circle, a Gardens Festival, with a theme that changes each year, is designed by landscaping students and created with schools and our gardens team. The garden of colours and scents, the medicinal and aromatic plant garden, the Jura arc garden, the willow garden, and also our ecological vegetable garden, complete the set.

More generally, these gardens are a field for experimentation and for sharing knowledge and techniques to take as much action as possible with living things and as little as possible against them… to give everyone the tools to live better, cooperate, help each other and build together a more sustainable future with greater solidarity.