Passchendaele Memorial Park, opening of the French memorial garden on Tuesday 19th November 2019.

The "Garden of 100 Years" refers to a 100-year peace that allowed a rich natural landscape to develop on a war-devastated land.

When the war ended a hundred years ago, both families and landscapes were destroyed. In France, large parts of the battlefield were left to nature.

The French Remembrance Garden is located on a wooded plot in the Passchendaele Memorial Park. A trained eye can properly observe a century of nature development there. The forest took over the land there. It evolved from a "pioneering phase" (vegetation on freshly turned soil) to an "advanced stage" (a rich forest vegetation in development that reaches a climax without human intervention).

This tangible evolution of 100 years of peace is the essence of the French Remembrance Garden. The garden shows the different phases of forest development, from felled land to dense vegetation. You can see felled trees and scrubland, while you can find small animals such as woodpeckers, insects and small mammals in the open space.