I discovered the school (http://www.ecole-paysage.fr/site/ensp_fr/index.htm) through the garden with which it is associated, the Potager du Roi (King’s Vegetable Garden), as many people apparently do. This is a wonderful garden that produces vegetables and fruits in an organic, low-intensive, mixed cultivation manner. Wildflowers grow under rows of apple trees, patches of tall grasses are interspersed with squares of squashes, and small plants grow over crumbling stone walls. It is one of my favourite places, and consistently magical. The ENSP is in the buildings along one side of the garden.

Yves Petit-Berghem is the professor of Ecology at the ENSP, and teaches students who are getting a diploma as landscape designers (Diplôme d’Etat de Paysagiste) and in the masters course called TDPP—which stands for theory, procedures, projects, landscape. Yves is a geographer by formation, a discipline that is in dialgoue with other sciences from geology to sociology, and including ecology. The ENSP is a former horticultural school, and retains a certain emphasis on horticulture through the Potager du Roi, where students learn about gardening, soil management, and cultural practices related to gardens. But today it has a diversified teaching staff teaching art, engineering, sociology, ethnobotany, and landscape design. The staff carries out multiple forms of research and projects corresponding to these disciplines, including in particular “action-research,” meaning applied projects. The graduates from the ENSP are also known for their project orientation, their ability to carry out practical interventions. I particularly wanted to ask Yves what it means to teach ecology to landscape design students. Even though ecology is at the heart of urban, periurban and rural land management and design issues, the science and the natural history of ecosystems often seems to be marginal or completely ignored. What do design students need and want to know about ecology, and how can this be communicated to them?

Yves told me that certainly ecology is important in order to properly understand how to insert plants into architectural spaces, conservation corridors, blue and green infrastructures (what Bioveins focuses on), and at the territory scale. From a systematic design perspective, designers should recognise that plants, animals, soil, and other ecological elements and their relations form a system and all have a role in understanding any one of those. The masters course focuses mainly on the important issues of ecology that society faces today, in a political sense, but less in an ecological sense.

Yves suggested that ecology could be better integrated with a design education. The students tend to be taught ecology from a botanical or “autecology” perspective, that is, a focus on the biology of individual species, rather than a community ecology perspective focusing on interactions of multiple species. Yves also suggested that a deeper focus on how to intervene in ecological issues, how to analyse them, and what to do with ecological data, are all issues that could be further integrated with the practical, project-oriented education that the school currently provides. The development of more communication and interaction between pure researchers and applied researchers would help to develop this integrated perspective in education.

It seems to be the case that the political, artistic or management aspects of environmental issues are easier to grasp than ecological knowledge itself. There is a lot of work to do to integrate ecological principles and theories, experiment, data, and natural history knowledge into the design of green cities.

--Meredith Root-Bernstein, 21-9-2019