As part of the competition of the International Garden Festival of the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire, the landscape designers Etienne Vazzanino, Laurian Gascon and Stanislas Jung have come together to design a “climatic” garden.
The “Jardin Zebre” received the design award at the 2021 edition.
Context: climate change
In a planetary context disturbed by human activity, our environment will be subjected to increasingly violent thermal amplitudes. Our gardens, and more broadly our crops, will be more and more impacted by this climatic imbalance. The theme of the competition being biomimicry. We thought it would be interesting to look for answers to these problems in extreme environments. We discovered the Zebra and its black and white dress.
Biomimicry: the Zebra
This homeothermic mammal would have developed during its evolution a strategy to regulate its body heat and survive in savannah. Indeed the zebra is subjected in its environment to a very strong thermal amplitude between the day and the night. Its zebra coat of black and white would help it to regulate its temperature. The black absorbs, the white reflects.
This thermal regulation prevents it from suffering from heat during the day and cold at night.
The Zebre garden, an experimental garden
Transposed to the garden, the zebra stripes of this animal are thought in relief. They are materialized by pergolas covered with canisses that do not let the sun reach the ground, these are the white strips. The black bands, which let the heat penetrate, are materialized by the gaps left between each pergola. One absorbs the heat, while the other stops it…the result is a slight draught tempering the extremes. Thus, the Zebra Garden, thanks to this alternation of exposures that characterizes its design, reproduces a temperate microclimate conducive to crops, even during the summer heat waves. To prove it, we have installed an undergrowth flora in one of the sunniest plots of the domain.
THE GARDEN IN A FEW WORDS :
- Budget : around 20K
- Surface : 350m2
- Location : Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire
- Design : Etienne Vazzanino, Laurian Gascon, Stanislas Jung
- Realization : Etienne Vazzanino, Laurian Gascon, Stanislas Jung, Christopher Doche
- Corporate sponsorship: STRUCTUREL and COBALYS
