COUNTRY MODERN
A hundred years after Monet began gardening at Giverny, noted French landscape designer Pascal Cribier began reinventing the country garden. Cribier is a conservationist who always prefers to keep as much as possible of what is already on site. He renovated the Tuileries gardens, to huge acclaim, working within the great design created by André le Nôtre 300 years before; so we see him working, like Monet, to bring new life to traditional layouts.
Monet’s garden was extremely high-maintenance because he chose to make it so, experimenting with colour and painting pictures with plants. Cribier prefers to start with a realistic maintenance plan and chooses plants accordingly.
In the garden at Chateau de Plaisir in Provence he found lines of grapevines and fruit trees and built on this theme, extending more strips from the house and underplanting plum trees with blocks of texture and colour. Instead of grass, the open central area is paved with rounded concrete slabs that look like stone, leading between silvery Mediterra- nean plantings, with the striking addition of gladioli blooming in the cracks between the pavers.
Another design features simple squares of different textures and colours as in a kitchen garden — some planted with herbs, some vegetables, some flowers, some clipped, some left to billow. These are all elements and plans that can be applied in easy and enjoyable ways; and the device of parallel or perimeter paths and narrow beds means that you can take quite a long stroll, even in a small garden.