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Litany

15 August 2008

I visited an old friend in Burgundy: Pierre Poupon, a winegrower and writer who has captured the soul of this ancient and complex part of France in a score of books over the course of fifty years. At 90 he moved from his house in the Meursault vineyards to a flat in the suburbs of Beaune. When he went he wrote the following litany to the plants he was leaving behind in his old garden.

Let us always remember

The thujas with their fine scented leaves

The bushy red-leaved prunus

The syringa covered in white stars

The Japanese quince with blood red flowers

The mauve lilac above the gate

 

France très profonde

4 August 2008

Utter originality, you would think, is a tall order in the world of gardening. Influences are all around us: we copy, we refine borrowed ideas – everything comes round again.

Not so at Orsan. The Prieuré de Notre Dame pretends to be in the monastic style of six centuries ago. It certainly evokes in shapes and symbols a strict and devotional mood. No priory or abbey, though, ever had a garden like it. It came from the imaginations and the drawing board of two Parisian architects to transform a tranquil valley in the almost abandoned centre of France – and to lodge in my mind as a piece of perfection to emulate and aspire to.

The architects, Patrice Taravella and Sonia Lesot, found and bought the one-time priory in the same year, 1991, as we found our French property, 30 miles away. It was an off-shoot of the great Benedictine Abbey of Fontevraud by the Loire to the north. Its setting would have suited the Cistercians: buried deep in wild country, among woods and stream, like Tintern or Citeaux or Rievaux.

There was no church left, and certainly no garden: just a three-sided court of dignified stone buildings open to a shallow pastoral valley, a stream and high woods. The architects’ minds, though, immediately parcelled it into a grid of strict formality. ‘Every designer’, says our friend Tara, ‘must start with un trame’ – a word that means a weaver’s pattern, suggests underlying order, and in this case is a set of squares imposed on the country like monastic discipline on unformed novices.

We have almost forgotten what pleasure lies in discipline, regularity and repetition. It is so far from the fashions of our times. What we forget,

perhaps, is that a pattern preordained, predictable and precisely applied feels

 

 

Light

23 July 2008

Illustrating this column, and feeding the insatiable Flower of the Week and Tree of the Month pages, gives my camera an unaccustomed amount of exercise. It is also reminding me that the only thing you can photograph is light. Perhaps it is too obvious to mention, but I find it more than useful; I find it essential in deciding whether a shot is worth the exposure.

These summer days, under a sky of sailing clouds in brilliant blue, you can choose the sunlit moment or the cloudy one. One gives bright highlights and deep shadows, the other a more sober picture, not necessarily truer but easier to read for information: to see the precise shape of a plant and its parts. Which is more informative about a garden? There is no categorical answer. In a sunlit photograph the lighting and shadow certainly distort the volumes and voids. They can convey, on the other hand, the sort of vitality that makes you want to visit.

Looking through such a collection of near ideal photographs as, for example, Andrew Lawson’s in The English Garden (2007, with Ursula Buchan) I find that more appear to have been taken on overcast days than under direct sunshine. The appearance is probably deceptive: filters can modify over-dramatic contrasts as well as correcting colours. Nothing, on the other hand, can penetrate the blackness of  shadows

 

 

The forsythia, first to flower in the spring

The cherry tree grown huge, majestic, prodigious

The prunus that flowers early and gives us red plums

The three birches with pale trunks and dancing leaves

The cherry with sour fruit so good in pies

The rather scruffy apple tree with a worm in each fruit

The upright hornbeam straight as a cypress

The purple beech turned green by early frost

The cherry starved by the roots of the beech

The tender almond with its immaculate flowers

The old lime tree, our neighbour, that loses its leaves at the end of summer

Remember all these gifts that we pass on to others

They are the ill-assorted collection you will find round any ordinary French house, adding up to a nondescript garden. It is a moving litany, none the less. He knows them, he loves them for all their faults, and he misses them.

 

 

 

like a straitjacket only until it is accepted. Once it seems normal it has the opposite effect: it solves all problems and leaves the imagination free to wander. The hedge-walled cloisters of Orsan can become a gardener’s spiritual home.

Symbolism is important, too. You enter through a garden of simples: healing herbs in beds like a pharmacist’s stockroom. Windows in high hornbeam hedges reveal an inner courtyard where only beans and wheat grow, in strict-ruled rows; then another where the one crop is grapes, from vines trained on chestnut trellis copied from a Book of Hours. The Hornbeam walks dividing and linking the spaces are cut with rigid precision, then ornamented with roses, also precisely trained in elaborate figures. No shoot but is tied in, often to a chestnut trellis that soars up above a hedge or describes some whimsical figure to break the pattern. Whimsy plays the role here that it does in illuminated manuscripts: the gardening monk is allowed his little jokes. One is a potager that turns out to be a maze, another a wicker orchard chair far too big to sit in.

At the crossing point in the centre of these green enclosures stands the fountain. Not a glittering display of the beauty of water, though; just a sober pedestal with four pipes dribbling barely enough to wet the stone. The subliminal message is that water is precious, scarce and to be carefully conserved.

We stayed at Orsan, in the modern hotel Tara has installed (and where he is chef for his own produce) in the priory buildings. Walking at night and waking in these decorous surroundings is a kind of cure. There could scarcely be a garden so different from my pragmatic and unruly domain. Yet coming home I felt revitalised by its real, intense, marshalled and directed forces.

Le Prieuré d'Orsan

 

 

 

Too much or too little?

created by strong direct light. The goal is lighting as even as possible without dulling the brilliance of colour and detail that brings a picture to life. Light from behind a plant often shows its character best of all.

Trees are my biggest problem. It is almost impossible to show the whole of a big tree without including far more sky than helps the picture. The light of the sky kills the detail outlined against it. A storm sky can offer the perfect solution: a tree sunlit against dark clouds is inevitably beautiful.

The other answer, of course, is to be a painter. The Edwardian gardens immortalized by such watercolourists as George Elgood and Margaret Waterfield never existed in such perfection. A painter can illuminate, edit, distort, correct and embellish as no camera can – not even a digital one.

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