A true observation laboratory, the Nine Squares Garden hosts a three-year vegetal exhibition in order to show what could have been “green experimentation” in the Middle Ages. It is a glance at medieval gardens and more precisely at botanical and gardening questions, that is to say on the history of plants and the symbols they embody.

Since 2004, four exhibitions have taken place:

• Season 1- 2004-2007: 

Hildegarde de Bingen Medicine Secrets

• Season 2 – 2007-2010: 

Plant colours – Coloured plants.

• Season 3 -2010-2013: 

Magic Plants, powers, symbols and properties.

• Season4 – 2013-2016: 

Symbolic plants, signs and emblems.

2012 Edition: Watching a rain garden / Regarde s’il pleut

Water is source of life, indissociable from gardening. In order to enjoy your garden under the rain, we put up translucent umbrellas… Water and natural light are staged: watering cans filled with roses sit on top of umbrellas and crystal igloos, which continuously pour the flowers. Water has many effects, beautiful and magical, revealed in these crystal installations.

2014 Edition: Magical Evocation of the park Ramon / Evocation magique du parc Ramon 

Le coCreation of a coloured flower garden in a virtual staging of the Park Ramon in Moscow. A pattern of multi-coloured perennial plants occupies the middle of the garden. It is surrounded by a ”Voroneskaya“ rose parterre, especially created for Park Ramon. Three vertical panels designed by artists for the occasion present the garden in its context: the great clock, the castle and the woodlands form a backdrop.

This project received the public’s first prize from the Metro newspaper and MFS festival’s Gold Medal 2014.

The project’s theme : “Le Nôtre’s Legacy in Pierre’s city”. Consequently it is symbolically situated on the Russian Museum’s grand staircase, opening on to the main perspective and classical parterres of Mikhailovsky Garden. Remembering that 17^th century formal gardens were laboratories where new shapes, ideas and innovating landscaping techniques were developed, the main purpose here is still to astonish visitors.

“Mobile Garden” is a theatre scene made out of steps edged with moveable screens, which refers to play sets, and fences used as wing-side-leg framing different scenes. Thus from the left and from the right (de cour et de jardin, theatre terms invented in Versailles) long and moveable flower tubs, sliding on rails, frame differently the view, more or less hiding the park.

You can yourself ‘stage design’ this garden and act the play, showing and hiding green features: visitors can modify the position of elements and offer new optical perceptions. Thus, it’s the visitor who is still and the garden in motion, as kinesthetic experimentation is reversed.

Celebrating Pushkin city 300 years

A unique landscape with two facets: the parterre like an accordion offers visitors two distinctive pictures, depending on where you are in the garden, made of two different green atmospheres. The objective is to surprise strollers by a subtle optical game: two images appear in the same perspective. The parterre is in the middle of a wooded pathway, in front of Saint Catherine’s Cathedral. It is composed of small triangular hummocks planted with different flowers on both side. Following a precise axis, two images appear: first a geometrical and abstract composition with warm colours, and secondly, a drape planted with cold-coloured flowers, evoking a silhouette of two people interlaced.

Tapis de Braises par Olivier Damée