Going out, transmitting, alerting, dazzling, decompartmentalising: in ten years, Marc Jeanson has modeled his profession as he pleases, that of botanist, determining the objectives that were close to his heart. “After a while, as a researcher, I felt limited in hyper-specialization. I wanted to embrace a more global approach, to build bridgessays the 41-year-old doctor of plant systematics (part of botany relating to the classification of plants). When a species disappears, it is, of course, a genetic heritage that goes away, but also an aesthetic, a poetry…”
Thus, the head of the herbarium at the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) has gradually become an ambassador for his discipline to the general public, a capable scientist, thanks to his clear explanations and his ability to share its wonders, to captivate without barber. After having, with the help of journalist Charlotte Fauve, signed Botanist (Grasset, 2019), a book that is both instructive and thrilling, it has lent itself willingly to conferences, round tables, radio and television broadcasts.
Pedagogy through beauty
Similarly, he seized the outstretched hand of the Chaumet jewelry house, whose plant universe is an infinite source of inspiration, to act as advisers and curators of exhibitions mixing jewelry, sketches and works of art (“ Drawing(e)in of nature”, in 2019, and “Vegetal – The school of beauty”, in 2022).
Other researchers linked to a public institution would undoubtedly have dismissed this house from the luxury group LVMH. Retorts to him that he defends “a form of pedagogy through beauty”. Above all, for the past three years, he has taken a step aside by taking the head of the botanical department of the Majorelle garden in Marrakech: “Unlike my mission on the herbarium at the MNHN, it is a question, here, of preserving a place which welcomes the public. » That is 600,000 visitors per year.
A taste for sharing that goes back to his youth. Coming from a middle-class family in Savigny-sur-Ardres, a village in the Marne, Marc Jeanson had a first click when he discovered, in a report from the program “Ushuaïa”, on TF1, the botanist Patrick Blanc in observing adeniums and dorstenias on the island of Socotra (Yemen). “I must have been 15, I was already fascinated by living things, animals. And Patrick Blanc’s eloquence, his vocabulary, his love for plants radiated. » The inspiring readings of Théodore Monod or Francis Hallé will do the rest.
Lapsed approach
With Patrick Blanc, the inventor of green walls, he will leave for the south of Mali for exhilarating expeditions: “Even when you prepare your mission down to the smallest detail, you always have surprises. Good ones : unexpected flowering, a perfect stage of fruiting, pollinators that we will be able to observe… And sometimes, disappointments: monocultures that replace areas to be preserved, for example. Nowadays, even in national parks you can hear chainsaws…”
In Majorelle, which he will leave in October 2023, he has worked to ensure that the garden is in harmony with biodiversity. “Historically, the pleasure garden was thought of as the apotheosis of the civilized against the wild world. However, in our world plagued by global warming, this approach is obsolete. All gardens should be botanical gardens. »