• The start-up Merci Raymond has just opened a new office in Bordeaux.

  • Its ambition is to support greening projects in the city, in real estate programs or within companies.

  • With around forty people, the young shoot does as much landscaping as urban agriculture.

Raymond is the first name of his Lot-et-Garonne grandfather, the one who gave him a taste for the earth and plants.

And gave the desire to bring nature to the city.

In 2015, Hugo Meunier, based in Paris, created the start-up Merci Raymond, whose ambition is to participate, on his own scale, in the greening of urban centers.

Seven years later, the entrepreneur from the South-West has just opened his second regional office in Bordeaux, after Marseille.

A return to basics?

Not only.

"Bordeaux remains a very mineralized city, where the stakes of revegetation were until now little integrated into town planning", observes Hugo Meunier.

Transversality

The start-up, which has been working for three years on its establishment in the South-West, claims that the city “has only 28 m2 of green space per inhabitant compared to 51 m2 in Nantes.

On the other hand, the ambitions to reverse this trend are there: “There are more and more gardens and productive spaces in areas that used to be market gardeners”, with in particular “around thirty shared gardens, representing 6 ha for 250,776 inhabitants, and more than 90 productive plots of 3,000 to 9,500 m2 located in Bacalan and Les Aubiers, compared to 1,200 plots in Nantes”.

It is this kind of initiative that the start-up supports, just as it intervenes in business projects, to green a terrace, a wall, a roof... The company, which now has around forty people, supports indeed urban projects whether for landscaping, "with an ecological dimension since we work mainly on islands of freshness", urban agriculture or plant design, "for interior greening", details Hugo Miller.

“Spread from La Rochelle to Toulouse”

A transversality "which interests a lot of actors", supports the entrepreneur, since it goes from promoters to architects through communities.

"Elected officials need us to apply their policies through real estate projects, and their technical services are sometimes undersized, and not always trained in new approaches to life and the landscape, while practices have evolved in recent years" , analyzes Hugo Meunier.

He takes as an example the “fashion” of greenhouses on the roofs, a desire of several elected officials which has spread in recent times, but not such a good idea as that.

“Generally, there is no one to maintain them behind…”



Since its creation, Merci Raymond has carried out more than 700 projects and planted more than 150,000 plants.

From Bordeaux, the ambition of the start-up “is to radiate from La Rochelle to Toulouse”.

Paris

Paris: Environmental associations are up in arms against the Porte de Montreuil development project

Planet

Greening: Why not all “natures” are equally beneficial for city dwellers

  • Bordeaux

  • Gironde

  • Aquitaine

  • Environment

  • Town planning

  • Nature