a year in a small urban garden: over the garden wall….

This month Ma Yogini ventures into French gardens – over to her!

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…..and into France to look at some larger and very much more splendid gardens in contrasting styles and coming from somewhat different traditions of gardening from the traditional English  and very far removed from anything to be found in my own patch.  I was a member of a party on an organised trip to look at gardens in the area of the River Loire and we stayed at Angers, which is on the Maine and not the Loire at all, and were taken by coach to visit gardens in Abbeys, Chateaux and private houses so the range was quite wide.

The chateau at Angers was a fearsome structure built when castles were seriously defensive and never, as with many of the others, converted into an elegant palace. These very formal flower beds are planted in the now dry moat and are intended to be looked at from above where the pattern can be best appreciated.  This is a very traditional French style of garden design from the 17th century and was very influential throughout Europe at the time and during the following century.  Known as parterres en broderie because  the patterns they formed echoed patterns found in embroidery of the time, these beds, lined with clipped box and planted with only low growing flowers, were usually placed near to the back of the house where they could easily be seen from the windows and gazed upon without any elevated structures to hinder contemplation of their patterns.  These of course are modern plantings in the old style.

Further and much more elaborate examples can be found at Villandry.  Since its restoration to the original pattern Villandry has become one of the most well-known gardens in France and in particular for its vegetable garden where the elaborate parterres are planted entirely with vegetable and salad crops. Each year two complete plantings take place and about 40 species are used each year on a three year rotation.  Such a potager is designed for display as well as utility in contrast to the walled vegetable gardens of Victorian and Edwardian England where the vegetables – and their gardeners- were kept well out of sight.  Purely for display at Villandry are the four large parterres which make up the Garden of Love.  Box hedges and red flowers play with themes of different kinds of love and invite the viewer, standing on the belvedere or raised pathway, to consider true love, broken hearts, jealousy and betrayal.

Because the gardens had not yet been planted up these photos are taken from Wiki!

This geometric style of garden design is very controlled.  Not only are bushes and trees pruned to an extent that some may find unnatural and distorted, flower beds and water confined within strict parameters, but there is even an attempt to control the viewer’s thoughts as he walks (no wandering allowed here) the weed free gravel paths!  Rigorous symmetry on this scale requires constant attention; 52km of box hedge for example need to be pruned every summer and hand weeded because the box has fragile roots.  This is gardening on a grand scale.

Gardening for display of power or wealth or more probably both has always been the privilege of the very rich and its apotheosis can be found in the great gardens of Versailles or Het Loo. Even the English landscaped gardens of ‘Capability’ Brown in the 18^th century, for all their seeming artlessness, were the result of immense labour and available only to the very rich. But there is another way of gardening and another rhythm of life.

Somewhere near the beginning of this series I wrote about walled gardens and the quiet spaces they create and in the midst of all this grandeur I thought of those spaces and how necessary they are to human content.  We all have demons – of anger, bitterness or even the need to control – and while we need to acknowledge them we also need to let them go and pottering quietly in my little garden is my way of letting go.  The great gardens of France were astonishing and I am very glad to have seen them but I was quite happy to see my own little place again.

We all need our own cloister garden, our paradise to which we fallen people can return.  If we can foster such a place of light and beauty in our lives, then our demons will meet their match.

–Fr Christopher Jamison, Order of St Benedict.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 27th, 2011 at 11:02 am and is filed under ma yogini's garden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.