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by Vincent Battesti

A Guide of Ornamental Plants in Egypt (temporary title)
coedited with Heba Farid and Claude Stemmelin, with the collaboration of Nejla El Maghraby and Therese Labib Youssef.

Update: Work on hold because / since the Egyptian revolution... :)

Editor and author of a book on the Ornamental gardens in Egypt.
This book will have both an art book and a botanical book format. It will deals with the history in general of ornamental gardens in Egypt (since Muhammad Ali) and with the history in particular of the garden of Ms Najla Maghraby in Mansuriya (near Cairo); it will also, at the same time, offer a flora on ornamental plants cultivated in Egypt (classifying approximately 1600 different species). The book will be richly illustrated.

This work should be released in 2012.

The book should have 800 pages, large format, colors.
Vincent Battesti (anthropologist) with Claude Stemmelin (photographer) & Heba Farid (designer), in collaboration with Nejla El Maghraby (collector), Therese Labib Youssef (botanist, Cairo Universiy & Orman Botanical Garden), with the help of Gilles Fédière (biologist, director of research IRD) and E. Vachetto (landscaper).
Work in progress…

Panoramique d’une partie du jardin de Mansuriya
© Vincent Battesti

Another probable main title is: The world in a garden... even, actually, if we should entitle it The world in a Garden, a Garden outside the World as, at the same time, ’all’ the plants of the world are relocated in this garden and this garden is also conceived as an abstraction, a bubble out of its Egyptian locus, little levitating paradise...

Le château dans le ciel, Hayao Miyazaki (2003)

To see:
 Website of Claude Stemmelin: http://www.fotocs.com
 Website of Heba Farid: http://www.re-title.com/artists/heb...
 Website on Botanical gardens in Egypt, (Ministry of Agriculture and land reclamation).