Les Orangeries of Bierbais is located in Hévillers, a section of the municipality of Mont-Saint-Guibert, located in the Wallonia in the province of Walloon Brabant in Belgium. The Orangeries of Bierbais were part, until the end of the 1980s, of the park of the Château de Bierbais. This part of the park, covering an area of 2.5 hectares, in the 19th century housed not only a collection of remarkable fruit and ornamental trees, but also monumental heated greenhouses of international reputation, the greenhouses of Bierbais, in the style of English gardens designed by the landscape architect Charles-Henri Petersen. Petersen lived at Bierbais until his death in 1859. Since 2019, the two remaining orangeries have been transformed into a third place hosting residences for artists and researchers as well as cultural activities, periodically open to the public.
History
The time of gardening in the 19th century
About forty years after Immanuel Kant introduced "the art of gardens" among the fine arts (1790), Baron De Man de Lennick, at the very moment when a wave of effervescence around this art swept through the Europe, notably France and England, has succeeded in satisfying, according to the book Temps du paysage by the philosopher Jacques Rancière. which deals with this period in the history of gardening, "an autonomous criterion of beauty by producing a specific pleasure, that which is born from the imitation of nature": "What is the amateur, Belgian or foreign, who does not know this beautiful property of Bierbais, whose turrets can be seen near the station of Mont-Saint-Guibert; this modern castle, built on an eminence in the middle of a grandiose park with secular trees". The park was to “imitate the features exhibited by objects and beings of nature in such a way as to make them recognizable, while beautifying them; but also to imitate, by assembling these traits of visible nature, an invisible nature defined as the perfect connection of its elements into a coherent whole", which, according to the Journal d'horticulture pratique de la Belgique (1857), seems to be precisely the case: "the most beautiful grapes, strawberries and pineapples, apricots and peaches bloom and bear fruit at will and in all seasons, alongside the most beautiful representatives of the flora of Asia, America and of Africa." In addition to the park, the greenhouses, daring in their monumental early use of iron, inaugurated on September 29, 1828, a year before Petersen finalized those of the Botanical Garden of Brussels, became famous: "Bierbais, whose greenhouses can rival those of the dukes of England and which in fact can show one of the continent's vastest collections of palms both for the quantity of the species as for the strength and the size of the trees." Like the park, they too should not be satisfied with "reproducing the features of recognizable things", but assemble "the features borrowed from the most beautiful models into a perfect figure which mere nature does not comprise": "no such steps, point of these wooden tablets, which remove the illusion and which are the anomaly of our greenhouses. It is a real parterre, interspersed with paths, ponds and lined with artificial rocks from which springs, here and there, a jet of water from among the greenery." The qualities that refer to the natural landscape of a visible garden, as wonderful as they are, are not enough – it takes more than that, something supernatural, Edenic. In short, what is sought after, and which the park and the greenhouses of Bierbais seem to offer, "is a real paradise".
Historical descriptions of the park, the greenhouses and the collections At least two detailed descriptions of the park with its greenhouses remain today. The first, from 1846, was published in the journal Art de construire et gouverner les serres [Art of Building and Governing Greenhouses]: "In Belgium, as in England, more than in France, great importance is attached to the construction of shelters which must receive plants which cannot live in the open air in temperate climates. The countless greenhouses that cover the soil of both Flanders and Brabant bear witness to this: amateur horticulturists and professional horticulturists compete in zeal on this subject. However, although the greenhouses of the latter are often erected with a certain research, they do not acquire this degree of architectural splendor or elegance that cannot be approached for merchant greenhouses, since the heads of establishments are obliged to form special greenhouses for each great family of plants which, growing in latitudes and in very varied conditions, require to be treated with care analogous to that lavished on them by nature in their homeland. But wealthy men, for whom floriculture is a relaxation and a source of lessons, not being subject to the same obligations, can raise these palaces where art is combined with the need for plants, where good taste comes in aid of the mathematical science of the builder. One of the finest models in this genre are the beautiful greenhouses of M. le Baron de Lennick, fig. 95, 96, extending over a length of nearly 430 meters.
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