The professional path taken, and the choices made by Philippe Niez, point at key elements of the trade of the gardener these last thirty years in France. They allow to point at the particularities of building a garden, its melting pot. This double perspective reflects the general situation of the trade, and the lessons involved in building a garden, along with the demands and wishes entrusted these days with this type of place. Neither an architect, nor a landscaper, nor an urbanist, or an agronomist, Philippe Niez gained an horticultural training at the école de Saint-Cyran, which no longer exists. While studying, he met Gilles Clément, and became quickly one of his closest associates, staying with him for almost fifteen years. After the public site of the Parc André Citröen in Paris, which he managed from beginning to end, Philippe Niez started his own agency in 1995, with Alexandra Schmidt, architect. Along with his partner and associates, Philippe Niez takes private commissions (the bastide des terres in Mirmande) and public commission (the abbey of Seuilly or the Cachan university campus.)

The answers to a garden are all based on a main idea, or a tender heart, whichever one prefers. A garden is first and foremost vegetation, not to be reduced to a technical, decorative, or spiritual point of view, even if this last dimension is present in the way Niez understands the nature of the site. The qualification and the appropriation of a place by plant life remain the specific work of the garden, and therefore of the garden designer. It does not mean that, in Niez's projects, plants are dominant or omnipresent as they are in the pictorial space of 18th century's gardens: They are present in the thoughful and sensitive composition between, on one hand , the diversity of the organic matters, and the ensemble of the others components, inert materials, edifices, landscapes, on the other hand.

From that the answers follow: The aesthetic choices (geometry), the historical references (the garden made out of blue faience from Nevers), the materials (wicker, pebbles), the colors (with a preference for the Yves Klein blue). The choice is clear: Vegetation is not here to fulfill a pre-conceived idea, already made, pre-established, it is producing its own space and its own light, as one realizes in the examplary small project of the Hôtel Lancaster in Paris, composed with Alexandra Schmidt. They had to update a rather dark courtyard: The problem to solve was not to fill space with a bucolic touch, even a sophisticated one, but to succeed in capturing light, and release it again around the surrounding space, while plants use light as a raw material.

As commerce and horticultural production are developping, at least in rich countries, and among the higher classes of society, vegetal species became better: They are more diverse, the palette of plant's colors experienced an explosion, and became widely available, if not better known. Hence the essential role played by an actor often forgotten in the making of a garden, the nursery gardener, advising the gardener in the background. Going often to trees' nurseries, knowing them, and their numerous characteristics, well, allows the project, not to come into view or to "take place", but to personify itself trully, in all its complexity. Then, the role of plans, while necessary, become secondary, as they are serving the "implantation" of the project's graft on the site, in order to aim at the inherent charm of the very being of the garden.

The extreme limit of this option is the pleasure Niez had to realize a garden without any plans (the Pastourellerie in the Blésois area.) This situation, a rare elegance, is quite unique, even for a private commission, and, since a long time ago, impossible for public commissions. This trade's ideal is common to the amateur and the owner, and no garden could exist without it, captured in the time frame of the plant, this vulnerable element, fragile, and terribly complex, transported and metamorphosed in the garden space, made artificial, through the attentive, curious and admirative eye of the gardener.

Partner since 1995 of Alexandra Schmidt, architect, Philippe Niez first learned his trade, for a few months, with the princess Strudza, at the boutique Despalles, and then for more than twelve years with Gilles Clément, directing for him the working site of Parc André Citröen. Today, his agency, with a staff swaying from four to eight persons, according to the stream of orders, is working on thirty five projets, from planning gardens for tenement houses to private gardens. In order to appreciate his latest creation, Parisians will enter the garden of the Hôtel Lancaster. There, to protect the privacy of a high-end clientele, he imagined romantic wicker booths. At the garden's center, a river of pebbles separates the bar from the restaurant. It harbors vegetation from the five continents. Here, as in all his other works, including the parc of the abbey of Seuily, close to Chinon, Philippe Niez is playing with opposites. The smooth floor, a paving stone with pebbles, is set against rugged materials (beech bark framing Eric Schmitt's fountain); it is light or dark, according to the vegetation's palette, chosen not only for its volume, but also for its ability to capture light. A beautiful demonstration of Philippe Niez's ability to mix natural material and urban environment.