This trip to India provided an opportunity to continue the exchange between peers and the sharing of cross-cultural knowledge initiated during the visit of a French delegation to Rajasthan in November 2022 and Somil Daga's residency in the spring of 2023. As a winner of the Odyssée residency programme coordinated by the ACCR, he was able to stay at the Arts Florissants foundation and the Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans. Regular links have been maintained since then, with a view to exchanging plant references, ideas and methods.

Born in 1992, Somil Daga studied engineering at a university in southern India and then, following the master-apprentice model, was trained for several years as a landscape gardener, naturalist and botanist by Pradip Krishen. Gradually wishing to retire, Pradip Krishen handed over the management of his parks and gardens - the Kishan Bagh in Jaipur, the Rao Jodha Rock Desert Park in Jodhpur and the Ahhichatragarh gardens in Nagaur - to Somil Daga, who now maintains and develops them as a consultant, supervising the teams of gardeners at the various sites.

Pradip Krishen and Somil Daga have developed a very detailed knowledge of desert ecosystems, particularly that of the Tahr desert, and are promoting the idea of using ecosystems in the gardens of Rajasthan rather than plants that require constant maintenance and intensive watering.

To enable the French teams to familiarise themselves with Indian biodiversity, several learning visits were organised: a guided tour of an 8km² forest in the centre of Delhi, a visit to the Kishan Bagh ‘educational’ park commissioned by the city of Jaipur from Pradip Krishen in 2016 and inaugurated in December 2021, a visit to the Rao Jodha Rock Desert Park commissioned by the Mehrangarh Museum Trust from Pradip Krishen in 2006, and a guided tour of Ahhichatragarh and its gardens created by Somil Daga and his local team.

Somil Daga is well advanced in a project to collect desert plant seeds, and was able to share this with Nathalie Joguet Rocheteau during a two-day trip to the Tahr desert near Jaisalmer for a new collection.

The French ACCR teams also met up with Ayla Joncheere, who took up residencies at various CCRs in the early 2020s, including the Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans. Although she is neither an artist agent nor a concert organiser, Ayla Joncheere regularly organises concerts and festivals or recommends artists thanks to her in-depth knowledge of the traditional music of Rajasthan (its history and place in Indian culture, its repertoire, its instruments and its musicians). Now Associate Professor of Performing Arts, Dance, Music, Anthropology and Cultural Management in the School of Liberal Arts laboratory at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, Ayla Joncheere was able to show visitors around the laboratory.

Feedback from Nathalie Joguet Rocheteau

‘My first meeting with Somil Daga was via a Zoom videoconference. From that day on, following the presentation of the gardens he looks after and his vision of his profession as a landscape gardener, I was ready to leave. Then Somil and his wife Parul came to spend a month in William Christie's gardens. It was a wonderful human and professional encounter, because our different histories of gardens did not prevent us, gardeners, from sharing the same motivations, relationships to our respective environments or problems. There followed many discussions on resource management, the choice of tree and plant varieties, the usefulness of pruning and methodologies. But also on the choice of cheese or the best pastry!

So it was time to set off to discover India, Rajasthan and Jodhpur. What will we remember? The welcome and the human relationship, of course, the culture absolutely. And in the gardens: the courage to restore without making easy choices, the desire to conserve natural environments and make them understandable to the public, respect for the environment, the ability to create something modern using what already exists. The desire to help children, adults and visitors from India and the West discover or rediscover all this knowledge.

Then, thanks to Somil, it was time to move south to Tamilnadu and, more specifically, to the Auroville Botanical Park. It was in this rather special place that I met Marie, a landscape gardener from Versailles who arrived in Auroville 18 years ago. Another wonderful human and professional encounter in a lush garden in stark contrast to the desert landscape of Rajasthan. But there were so many botanical discoveries to be made, and so many discussions on how to welcome young visitors, on adult workshops, and on the presence and management of volunteers in the garden.

In short, we're all keen to continue working together, exchanging ideas on our practices, and improving through these exchanges. When do we go back?’