A cloister design project as part of the Hildegard de Bingen exhibition For their exhibition on Hildegard de Bingen, the Association des Compagnons de l’Abbaye de Bon-Repos, together with Côtes-d’Armor Departmental Council, owner of the abbey, decided to task students at the Campus de Merdrignac with designing a garden featuring the medicinal plants mentioned by the Abbess in her writings.

The students who took on the project are in the first year of their Advanced Technician Certificate sandwich course in Landscape Design. They formed four design groups—Créasol, Histoire des Jardins, Les Zinzinous and Mené Paysages—which each put forward a project.

Following the presentation of all four projects to a selection panel in May 2024, the Histoire des Jardins group’s Spirale Végétale (Plant Spiral) project emerged as the winner.

The group’s project was selected for its clean lines, its reversibility, its choice of a design aimed at bringing visitors as close as possible to the plants, and a bench size that can accommodate a large number of people within the central part of the cloister.

The students chose to evoke Hildegard de Bingen’s mystical visions in their garden by making symbolic reference to the golden ratio and an exploration of the logarithmic spiral associated with it.

The pathway and bench represent the spiral of the golden rectangle. The spiral leads to a fig tree. On the other side of the bench, the plants mentioned in Hildegard de Bingen’s works are presented in radiating rows alternating plants and pebbles.