"French gardens, that's just not my thing." That's easy to understand. His thing is to salvage, to restore the broken link between Man and Nature: "I'm not dreaming of going back to the past, but I know that we have forgotten some fundamental things there." In his spare time, he isolates himself in an old, abandonned garden: "Here, I renew with the people of the past. In digging around in the earth, I look for signs of humanity. Fot the moment, there's nothing but the bones of cats." Bones which join the immense puzzle that he has undertaken to put together: shards of pottery, ploughshares, ageless blades and hinges, manuscripts and television sets, but above all, seeds and sowings in distress. It's his way of repairing the ravages of time.

So, to pass along this fragile heritage, Jean-Luc Danneyrolles cultivates and sells little known pimentos and mad tomatoes (Banana legs, white cherries, black plums, yellow Mirabelles and green grapes), helps chefs Alain Ducasse and Reine Samut design their vegetable gardens, creates them with children at their schools, teaches the gardeners of tomorrow: "Since the beginning of the 20th century, certain visionaries, alarmed, have tried to save this living heritage. But the ideal remains dynamic preservation; neither in museums nor in notrogenous liquid, but in the vegetable gardens." Archimbolo would have loved this cultivated cultivator, determinedly unconventional.