Contemporary Herbarium of the Orchard and Fruits of the Press

By Roselyne Corblin and Pascal Levaillant

Canteleu, Normandy, France

Herbier Contemporain Du Verger & Des Fruits De Pressoir – Version Française PDF

FREQUIN ROUGE
© Pascal Levaillant & Roselyne Corblin 2022

It is in Normandy, bathed in light, with shimmering mists and dappled patches of colour, Pascal Levaillant collects material and shaped a new project. It is a quieter, respectful action that meadows and orchards call for: Picking, collecting, contemplation ; slow, contemplative practice, modulated by the seasons.

Levaillant chooses this style of patient cataloguing of the orchard’s abundant harvest to form, in a manner, a reliquary for veneration. He is like the old man of Taranto, described by Virgil in the Georgics, a peasant who calmly cultivates his rural plot day after day and whose temporal rhythm is that of “Festina Lente”.

Festina lente – Hâte toi lentement – Hurry up slowly

This is the guiding motto of the gardener. Pascal Levaillant’s contemporary herbaria respond perfectly to this instruction. Pascal Levaillant’s celebrations and offerings are odes to “natural nature” – nature naturante – as described by French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne, to distinquish it from natured nature – nature naturée – which, having been subjected to increasingly industrial treatments, is diminished to its genetic makeup.

The gardener, the landscaper, the poet or the painter are close to this natural nature. They capture life, they see what flourishes and dies, what the ancients called phusis, the good housekeeper, thrifty and giving to each according to need.

However, this natural nature likes to remain hidden, or at least does not show itself clearly. It lets itself be perceived little by little. To find it requires patience, skill and persistence.

Many contemporary artists are currently attempting a biosensitive approach. They may do this by denouncing the exploitation of natural products by the agri-food industries, a form of planetary transgenics, as Canadian artist Pat Badani does with her long term project “Al Grano” that uses a grain of maize to contemplate global issues of sustainability. Or artists might seek to purify, even through the artistic process itself, thus aiming for the little, the almost nothing, or, in the extreme, the void. Subsconsciously, it seems that this is the path that Pascal Levaillant is following.

The passage above is based upon a text written by Anne Cauquelin for Pascal Levaillant. Anne Cauquelin is a French philospher and author, Emeritus Professor at the Universities of Paris and Picardy. Her books include ‘The invention of the landscape’(2004); ‘A small treatise on the ordinary garden’(2005) and ‘Contemporary Art’(2009).

Avrolles - conservatory orchard of Brémontier-Merval 2022-Pays de Bray © Pascal Levaillant

Norman artist and native of Rouen, Pascal Levaillant lived his early years in Hautot-St-Sulpice in the heart of the Pays de Caux in Normandy, then he lived in Yvetot from 1964 to 2022 before moving to Canteleu, near Rouen.

Pascal Levaillant

Visual artist, artist-botanist, he has been an explorer and gatherer of biodiversity since his early youth. He has been composing several contemporary herbaria since 2008 presented in the form of a nomadic garden, a type of land art. This is in effect an outdoor cabinet of curiosities laid out in Petri dishes. This form of herbarium is a third generation, following the tradition of engravings and drawings, and those pressed in paper in the 16th century. There are aromatic plants, tinctorial plants, technical and/or industrial plants, medicinal plants, food plants, cereal plants and more recently orchard plants and fruits of the press.

Levaillant has exhibited in Rouen, Paris, Le Havre, Hazebrouck, Saint-Etienne, Dijon, Mantes, Honfleur, Chartres, Exeter, Dieppe, Vascœuil, Plouguerneau, Les Andelys, Yvetot, Harcourt, La Hague, Sainte-Mère-l’ Eglise, and Domfront, in total showing at more than 240 fairs and exhibitions.

Contact Pascal Levaillant by email

“The man is nothing, the work is everything! ”

Gustave Flaubert, Letter to George Sand 1875

Since 2022, Pascal Levaillant has been co-constructing his herbaria with Roselyne Corblin:

Roselyne Corblin

Originally from the Pays d’Auge, Roselyne Corblin is a teacher who has supervised numerous artistic creation projects to exhibit student work.

Over time Roselyne began accompanying Pascal in his herborisations – finding, classifying and preparing plants – in the installation of his exhibitions (plant mosaic, plant and environmental art, and land art), in his workshops, and at events. Both retired, they have now combined their creative practices. Sharing a common taste for nature, they immerse themselves in the natural environments of the Normandy coast, the Seine valley, and the forests.

“Our orchard herbarium is a nomadic garden without soil, without roots. It combines botany, literature, pomology, horticulture, poetry, art and heritage in the footsteps of great authors: Rousseau, Flaubert, Thoreau, Sand, and Maupassant and the scholars: Birlouez, Cauquelin, Chauvet, Cambornac, Ruas, Serres, Hauchecorne, Truelle, Girardin, Knight, Van Mons… Those that we read attentively provide the knowledge that has nourished and inspired us”.

The herbaria are built using the sieve, an ideal tool for sifting; and the dehydrator, an ideal machine to get rid of the organic parasites of these raw vegetative materials, or under the effect of the rays of the sun. Each element – fruit, pip, leaf, stem, flower… – is thus peeled, dusted off one by one. “They realize what Jean-Jacques Rousseau dreamed of, frustrated in his time at not being able to incorporate volume (moss, lichens, fruit, etc.) into a herbarium.”

This material, harvested in heritage places including the orchard of the planted courtyard of the Manoir du Fay and its enclosed garden, is transformed and magnified to become an artistic work in its own right, which tells the stories of the orchards.

The contents of the herbarium of the orchard and fruits of the press created in 2022 were collected, harvested or picked up, in the planted courtyard of the Manoir du Fay and its enclosed garden, in the orchard of the Jardin des Plantes de Rouen and in the orchard of the Saint-Georges-de-Boscherville Abbey as well as the conservatory orchard of Brémontier Merval.

Here are a selection of the first specimens that we wish to show in these previously unpublished plates: Stark Jongrimes, Argile, and Clos Renaux. Further examples are included in the document in French. Eventually they will integrate nearly 100 varieties from Yvetot and the Pays de Caux and Pays de Bray.

Follow the evolution of the herbarium over time on Pascal’s and Roselyne’s blog

In 2022 Marie-Thérèse Mériot and Pascal Levaillant published the article ‘M.Legrand – Incubator and Creator of Michelin’ for Apples & People