The Potager of the Koimeterion, like a surveyor, sits nestled into the salt marsh at the chapel of St Anne, a hinged threshold within the sea dyke that leads pilgrims to Mont-Saint-Michel. Locking into both the real and imagined narratives of the bay of the abbey island, the garden archipelago offers a programme of cultivation, registration and recouperation through typologies of skin, husk, walkway, garden, vessel and cast. Each piece is layered upon the salt marsh in response to the programmes of hospitality and cultivation.
Weaving between the urbanity of the island territory of Mont-Saint-Michel and the productive farmland of the polders The Potager of the Koimeterion draws upon the uncertain nature of the tidal bay through a gathering of architectural characters which witness and register local flooding as an indication of a global condition.
Eight garden chambers are caught in a reinforced dyke. Like drawers pulled from a cabinet, they gradually receive and collect the detritus of the salt marsh – catching, filtering and processing; cultivating the temporal narratives of the tide and the gradual erosion of the land. The pilgrimage route is then registered above through architectures of sustenance - The Culinarian (kitchen garden), The Bather (bathhouse) and The traveller (dormitory). Together, they employ an economy of materials where finely crafted timber acts as an internal tide marker of inhabitation amongst an industrial assemblage of beams and posts. Limestone raised beds form fragments of polder land strategically dispersed as an elevated cloister garden.
