Bonnieux

Today felt like a study in sculptural thinking – first in landscape, then in wood.

In Bonnieux we visited La Louve, the extraordinary garden created by Nicole de Vésian. What strikes you immediately is restraint. Nothing shouts. The garden is clipped, pared back, disciplined – yet somehow deeply emotional. Rounded shrubs echo the hills of the Luberon, stone terraces hold the landscape together, and every plant seems chosen for texture, shadow and form rather than flower. De Vésian came to gardening late in life after a career with Hermès, and you can feel the eye of a designer in everything: editing, proportion, materiality, repetition.

The garden almost behaves like sculpture. Or perhaps more accurately, like couture translated into landscape. Mediterranean plants – thyme, rosemary, cistus, lavender, box – become masses and volumes rather than “garden specimens”. Stone and foliage are treated equally.

After lunch we moved from sculpted landscape to sculpture itself with Marc Nucera. The connection between the two felt immediate. Nucera works with timber as though the tree is still alive within it. His chainsaw carvings are fluid and muscular, but never disconnected from the original form of the wood. He talks about listening to the tree, allowing its grain, scars and movement to dictate the outcome.

What became obvious through the day is that both artists are really doing the same thing: revealing form already hidden in nature.

Nicole de Vésian shaped living plants until they became part architecture, part geology. Marc Nucera carves dead trees so they continue to move. One edits growth; the other releases it. Both create work that feels ancient and contemporary at the same time.

The garden of Nicole de Vesian

For someone interested in gardens, landscape and geology, Provence keeps reinforcing the same lesson: the strongest design often comes from working with the character of the material rather than imposing against it. Stone wants to be stone. Wood wants to be wood. Mediterranean plants want to live hard, dry, sculptural lives. The art comes from understanding that deeply enough to simplify rather than decorate.