Collège des Écossais, Montpellier

[1] As the Jardin des plantes de Montpellier, first botanical garden in France, was implemented there in 1593 as part of the medicine faculty, the place had a long-standing tradition in these sciences.

« The concept of the Scots College as an international students’ Center emerged during Geddes’ first travel to Montpellier in 1890, when invited by his friend Charles Flahault » after « he met the French botanist at the Marine Station of Roscoff in 1878.

[4] But as the College was also conceived as an educational and research center, the Scottish Pavilion housed too the SIGMA (International Station of Mediterranean and Alpine Geobotany) laboratory founded by Josias Braun-Blanquet, the Swiss botanist settled in Montpellier after he submitted a dissertation on phytosociology supervised by Flahault.

[3] By conceiving it as a place for teaching not only regional culture, geography, town planning, sociology, biology, botany and other sciences, but mainly “Life As a Whole”, Geddes creates there the last of what the French philosopher Thierry Paquot calls PG’s finest invention: the pedagogical garden.

With Metagraphies, Sabine Kraus has organised commented visits of the College on several occasions,[8] in order to illustrate in vivo how « Geddes’ human ecology unifies Nature and Civilisation ».