Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Fall in France Love with e’s finest gardens
Monty Don on the stars of his new TV series, rich in romance, history, art and Michelin-starred vegetables!
My first visit to Paris in 1970 was – and remains – the most exciting trip of my life. I was 15 and everything was exotic, from the distinctive smell of the home- grown tobacco to the wine that accompanied what was then considered the best food in the world. For a provincial schoolboy who had never been abroad before it was a completely formative experience.
Four years later I spent six months in the delightful southern French city of Aix-en-Provence. I was trying to improve my French while working in a garden a few miles outside town in the village of Le Tholonet, beneath Mont Sainte-Victoire. Aix was beautiful, living was cheap and the weather was superb. It was a kind of heaven.
Over the years I’ve been back to France many times, but although I’ve visited hundreds of gardens in the most far-flung corners of the world, for some reason I’d never properly explored those of our nearest neighbour. So, last year I thought it was time to set that right and visit as many of the country’s gardens as I could. The result is a three-part BBC2 series, Monty Don’s French Gardens, which starts on Friday. In it I look at gardens that fit into three very distinct themes – history, art and food – that are central to both French gardens and French culture.
I started by returning to Aix- en-Provence. It hasn’t changed much in 40 years. The Provençal light is still radiant and there are superb gardens like La Louve, in the pretty village of Bonnieux a few miles to the north. It is a small but perfect example of a Provençal garden that fits harmoniously into its surroundings, with clipped lavender, box, myrtle and rosemary and tapestry-like colours that soften the intensity of the sun. There’s the Val Joanis, which has a large modern potager, or vegetable garden, set amid extensive vineyards, that is made decorative with every kind of pruning, shaping, training and topiary applied to fruit and vegetables.
In the Camargue, that marshy strip running from Arles down to the Mediterranean where black bulls, white horses and pink flamingoes roam, I saw the best tomatoes I’ve ever encountered – along with a huge range of other organic vegetables and herbs – grown in the garden of a Michelin-starred restaurant. Of course the French passion for good food and sourcing the very best local ingredients, combined with their love of order and symmetry, means the potager is a style of garden they do better than anyone else. The most famous example of all is Villandry, near Tours in the Loire Valley, where they grow tens of thousands of vegetables in perfectly ordered, box-edged geometric beds – all entirely for show. Just down the road from there, on the river Cher, is Chenonceau, which has two historical gardens – one made by the mistress of King Henri II in the 1550s and the other by the king’s wife as a triumphant snub to her husband’s lover – both of which adjoin the exquisite château.
Of course the most famous French king of all is Louis XIV, the Sun King, who reigned from 1643 to 1715 and built his own vast garden at Versailles, just outside Paris. Versailles is almost unimaginably large. The gardens cost about £400 million in today’s money and extended to 1,800 acres, with more than 1,000 fountains, waterfalls, lakes and canals. All this was spurred by rage. South of Paris, near Fontainebleau, is the garden of Vaux le Vicomte, created by Nicolas Fouquet, then the young king’s finance minister. Fouquet hired the greatest designers in France and an army of 18,000 workmen to create what was then the most magnificent garden France had ever seen, with statues, parterres, shrubberies, grottoes, lawns and water features. Fouquet threw a huge party to celebrate. The 22-year-old king Louis was invited but was beside himself with envy and fury. A few days later Fouquet was arrested and thrown in prison for the rest of his life and all his property – even the plants and statues and his staff – were seized and
taken to Versailles, where the king commanded a garden to be built that was even bigger and better than Vaux-le-Vicomte. Versailles is certainly bigger – in fact it’s bigger than almost any other garden in the world – but in my opinion it is not better.
Just a 20-minute drive from Vaux-le-Vicomte is the beautiful Château de Courances. It’s one of my favourite gardens in the world, let alone France, with the ideal mixture of romanticism and elegant formality. It makes an ideal visiting companion to Vaux-le-Vicomte.
My tour also took in three gardens in Paris. The first was created as the garden to the Palace of the Tuileries, long since pulled down, sitting between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde. This is one of the most stylish public gardens in the world and the best place to sit or stroll and watch Parisians display themselves. Further west is the modern business centre of Paris called La Défense. This forest of glass towers also includes a series of unusual and often beautiful gardens including a ‘Growing Wall’ by Patrick Blanc, who is famed for his vertical gardens.
The allotments I visited in the north- eastern suburbs of Paris were more my kind of horticulture, although I would draw the line at keeping hares for making into terrine, as was the case on one plot. But apart from this and the clink of boules being played between allotmenteers, as well as the clink of wine glasses made by a family cheerfully lunching at a large table outside their shed, it was very similar to a British allotment site – essentially gardeners the world over speak the same language.
From the capital I headed out into Normandy and made a return visit to Monet’s great garden at Giverny and to two gardens that were new to me. The extravagant and magnificent Champ de Bataille, in the middle of the countryside just outside Le Neubourg, is a 94-acre, 21st-century version of Versailles; a mad, glorious folly. Very different is Le Jardin Plume near Rouen, a gentle, exquisite celebration of grasses interwoven into a tapestry of colour with sculpted hedges. You come away full of fresh ideas for your own garden.
These are just a few of the gardens I visited for my French series, and there were many others rich in inspiration and delight. I do hope you enjoy them as much as I did. Monty Don’s French Gardens starts on Friday, 9pm, BBC2.