I can see that you are very deeply involved in this adventure and I certainly wish you well with it. As I said in the article in Vista however, I have had occasion to observe that for British gardeners, gardens are “about plants” whereas for French gardeners I think, oversimplifying a bit in both cases, gardens are more about space and sites, and I wonder how many young French designers would be willing to take on a project where the spaces, even the paths, are already given.  I’ve just finished writing a book with Gilles Clément who teaches at the school for Versailles, where he describes his workshops with students, and he forbids them to work out the paths before getting a sense of the site, biological and esthetic, quite independently of practical constraints.  This is just one example.  You will see in the book on Chaumont, where the chapters are by theme, what some of the other approaches are, only one of six of those chapters is about plants.
 

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