The photographs which constitute that book were taken at Saint-Benedict priory in Palendriai, July 10-13, 2014.
Palendriai is located in Lithuania, 140 miles northwest of Vilnius. The climate tends to be somewhat harsh and the soil is rather poor. Just before World War II, the hamlet was home to about eighteen families. Today, the only inhabitants are the fifteen Benedictine monks of Saint-Benedict’s priory, founded in 1998 by the Abbey of Solesmes in France. Between 2000 and 2001, parallel to the construction of the new buildings for the monastery, landscape architect Bernard Depoorter remodeled the surroundings, consisting of pastures, forests and swamps. Earthworks, the creation of a pond, and the implanting of many trees and shrubs, helped to trace out a new, invented landscape, which has been changing continually ever since with the seasons and the slow growth of vegetation, gradually returning back to a state of nature.