RIDE & CREATE "BOTANICOOL" | KALICE BRUN
The Côte d’Azur is known as much for its cities, culture and chic resorts as its natural beauty. But outside the hustle and bustle, often just behind the tower blocks, gardens and resorts, there still exist wild places on our shores. And in these wild places you just might find Karine Brun. Also known as ‘Kalice’, she’s a herbalist, naturopath and therapist, exploring and exploiting the secrets of the indigenous plants of the Riviera.
Brun was born in the Nice back country and growing up spent her summers in the haven of biodiversity now protected by the Mercantour National Park. However, she also formed a deep attachment to the sea, coming regularly to swim at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. She also spent time near the coast at her grandmother’s, where, in the back garden, she collected plants and made mixtures in the outside basin. “It was forbidden to disturb me,” she says. “I was convinced I was making magic potions.” She made these healing potions with the same intensity as she did her adventuring.
These ‘olfactory voyages’ use the plants they discover to shed light upon and interrogate her clients’ experiences, intentions, their links with nature, life path. This work mirrors exactly what plants do: grow into the light. “There are two impulses in my everyday interactions with plants,” she says.
“An intuitive part – an encounter, a touch, a smell – that leads me to follow threads of information, and an olfactory part: why not use that particular plant as an essential oil, to work at things from the inside as well?”
On a beautiful early spring day, we took a morning coffee at the Café before riding out behind Kalice, foraging bag on her back. First stop were the gardens in front of the prehistoric site of the Lazaret cave, on the outskirts of Nice. Here, where wild nature was gaining the upper hand on the planted species, it wasn’t hard to imagine the prehistoric people using the same plants to cure and heal in their turn.
It was the perfect place for her to expand upon the concept of the ‘garden world’, promoted by the botanist and gardener Gilles Clément, which reflects how humans have shaped the landscape and biodiversity through their centuries-long interactions with nature. “We can collaborate with plants but we can’t dominate them,” Kalice says. “Even if we cultivate them, there’ll always be some wildness.”
