projects & sanctuaries

• the botanical cabinet - digne-les-bains
• It is not surprising that Honnorat the philologist would know and show an interest in the plant names, for he was a tireless collector of the plants themselves, creating as comprehensive an herbarium of regional species as has ever existed. His herbarium is thought to have contained thousands of specimens. Many of these were collected in the heavily wooded mountainous area of Faillefeu, in the hills above the upper valley of the river Béone, and he presented a special two-volume herbarium to the landowner of the area who had facilitated his botanising there.
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  fig. 1 cabinet de botanique.
  This was a stroke of good fortune, for Honnorat's entire collections of geological and botanical specimens were thrown away, unwanted and unsaleable, when his son, who worked in textiles in Flanders, came, after his father's death, to clear out the doctor's house in Digne. These two beautiful volumes of c.1804, almost all that remains of Honnorat's botanic collections, are the centrepiece of the cabinet [de botanique en l'honneur du docteur honnorat], occupying a glass case in the middle of the room, with each week a new page turned.
• At de vries's request the floor of the narrow oblong room is made of local early nineteenth-century tiles, discovered recently when repairs were undertaken in the museum, and the walls are panelled to dado height with walnut, the wood used locally over centuries in the facture of vernacular furniture. Above this, on the two longer walls, there are arranged 111 of de vries's own botanical 'real works' of various dimensions, framed in walnut and in free configurations that deliberately deny the paradigmatic ordering of nineteenth-century museum presentations. This informal array is of specimens collected by herman and susanne in the woods and valleys of Faillefeu, with Honnorat in mind. They are plant self-portraits, each plant 'saying itself', each at once a document and an image, of itself: nature has become art and their irregular configuration signals their status as distinct from that of the scientifically systematic herbarium of which the two volumes in the room were a part.
• The installation is perfectly completed by a contemporary portrait of Dr. Honnorat brought into the light after long exile in the museum storerooms. He is pictured, gravely handsome seated at his work table, quill pen in hand, working on the introduction to his Dictionnaire provençal-Français. Behind him on a shelf, as attributes, are piled three stout volumes: Linnaeus, Hippocrates and Jean de La Fontaine.
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