L’île de la Pépinière > Fanny Anthoine-Milhomme, Jean-Philippe Teyssier, 2010

The Ile de la Pépinière produces willow, it is its raw material : behind it is the idea of two landscape designers, Fanny Anthoine-Milhomme and Jean-Philippe Teyssier, who on visiting the Hortillonnages for the first time, realised that a technique of corbelling the banks, using planks to encircle the plots, had now taken over from the ancient traditions of wattling and fascining. Efficient, as its need no maintenance for seven years, this modern practice nonetheless poses problems for the biodiversity of this gardened marshland : in fact, it removes the banks, the point of contact between land and water, and an important reserve of wildlife and plants. The landscape designers then decided to offer it to the city of Amiens as a public service area ; both as a source of material and an experimental zone. Their plot consequently became a real nursery dedicated to bank maintenance, the main problem in the Hortillonnages. More than 3,000 different species of willows – Triandra, Alba, Fragilis, Purpurea Daphnoides, and Purpurea Elix, etc. – grow here in cultivated strips, trained in several different ways, a pretty presentation of a product of general interest.