The garden
DESIGNERS
Laurent DABOMPREZ and Gaëlle VAN DAMME, landscape-designers of ecological parks and gardens–organic gardeners
BELGIUM
Art is in Gaëlle Van Damme's blood. After studying at the Fine Arts Academy in Brussels, where she honed her drawing and sculpture skills, she went on to explore photography at the Haute Ecole - ESA LE 75. Through travel, hiking and training as a Nature Guide, she has added a naturalist string to her academic bow. It took eight years of horticulture and work in a nursery specialising in the cultivation of native plants (Ecosem SPRL) for her to take the plunge and set up her own design business. Her overflowing imagination, botanical knowledge, draughtsmanship skills and practice spurred her to found "Empreinte Nature" which has been shaping ecological gardens since 2014. In each of her projects, she combines the beauty of the landscape, originality and art with the environment and ecology.
Born in Belgium, Laurent Dabomprez is an enthusiast, never short of ideas and always ready to embark on new projects and challenges. After a short spell studying agronomics, and despite his love of nature, he eventually settled on IT as his subject of choice, and qualified as an analyst-programmer in 1999 (Haute Ecole Léonard de Vinci, Brussels). A born entrepreneur, for ten years he has been jointly heading up a web-marketing company which specialises in designing Web solutions. Beyond the technical side of things, his main interests have always lain in "user-experience" and creativity. Through a customer-oriented approach in close liaison with designers, he has always focused on the aesthetic and functional aspects of projects, with his twofold technical and creative talent gradually coming to the fore. In 2009 he decided to steer his career slowly but surely in a different direction. It was time for him to get back to his roots, those of a less virtual life, in contact with the soil, in step with the seasons, but where he was still able to express his creativity and share his ideas. The "nature allowed" garden sums up his philosophy. From training to training, study to study, it is thanks to self-teaching that he is where he is today - designing and tending to the landscape with living organisms and biodiversity very much taken on board. His gardens are inspired by Mother Nature and cultivated together with Her. He tries not to lose sight of what's in it for visitors for all that, and devotes time to the immersive dimension of each design. A calling which he always throws himself wholeheartedly into accomplishing.
