When he was 25, Georges Daudelin travelled to France to study at the Ecole Nationale d’Horticulture in Versailles (Landscaping and Garden Art, 1953-55). But four years earlier (1951), while still a student at the Montreal Botanical Gardens, Georges took on a challenging commission: designing the gardens for a home for his brother Charles, then sited in the middle of a field of onions.
Fast forward 70 years. Charles had become a famously renowned Quebec artist and sculptor, and Georges, a storied landscape architect, named one of Quebec’s best. New owners threatened to demolish the site, raising the ire of preservationists, who persevered. In December, 2022, Quebec announced the home would be saved, named a heritage site.
It was not the first of Daudelin’s works to be so honoured.
In Daudelin’s early years, he worked with LA luminaires Louis Perron, and Benoit Bégin (Bégin & Robert, Town Planners), often in Trois-Rivières. With Bégin, he designed welcoming “garden city” style neighbourhoods, (St-Jean-Baptiste-de-la-Salle sector, Trois-Rivières). Then in 1962, he worked on the city’s cemetery landscape to shape a perfect site for a future chapel: The Mausoleum of the Bishops of Trois-Rivières. It is now a heritage site, as is Daudelin’s Campus Notre-Dame-de-Foy (1963-65).
In Trois-Rivières, Daudelin’s site plan for l’Hotel-de-Ville and the reconstruction of the city’s Champlain Park (1967), remains a city gem. It “gave a new life to the contemporary square,” wrote historian Ron Williams, with its “large water basins and fountains of contemporary allure.”
Preparing for Montreal’s Expo ‘67, Daudelin left his Trois-Rivières work with Georges Robert, to join D.W. Graham and Otis Bishopric to lay out the splendid “natural” park on Ile Notre-Dame. During those busy years, he was a founder of the AAPQ and its second President, and he worked with Doug Harper to design the curriculum for the University of Montreal’s new Faculty of Environmental Design. He taught at the school, and continued to take on projects, such as the award-winning Centre d’interpretation de Percé (with Jodoin Lamarre Pratte Architects, 1972), where he used native trees and plants to mask the wild panorama, coaxing people forward to discover the extraordinary natural beauty there.
From 1971-93, Daudelin joined Quebec’s Ministere du Loisir, de la Chasse et de la Peche, staying active with the AAPQ/CSLA, and in local politics. He remained an advocate for the profession, and the CSLA honoured him with the Schwabenbauer Medal in 1997. Renowned landscape architect Danièle Routaboule, who met him first in Trois-Rivières in 1964, remembers a man “whose skills impressed the young professional that I was, just arrived in this country…. He demonstrated an incredible knowledge of plants and a great sense of plant compositions….In this respect, he was an artist.”
Photo Credits
1 + 2 Parc Champlain. Photos Danièle Routaboule, 1976.06. University of Montreal. (Calypso site)
3, 4, 5 from Architecture-Concept, mars, 1969.3 Parc Champlain 4 Lac La Vieille 5 Doug Harper (third from left) and Georges Daudelin (far right) with students at U of Montreal.
6 Brochure: Campus Notre-Dame-de-Foy, Patrimoine Culturel de Quebec (also an Optional winter shot)
7 1972 award-winning Centre d’interpretation de Percé (Jodoin Lamarre Pratte Architects, website)
