Prairie fleurie...

The native wildflower meadow begins to bloom in the orchard at the Chateau

Above: a rare white bluebell blooms, daffodils perfume the air. In the background, the stone barns in the Basse-Cour of the château.

Chère amie, cher ami
 
"Vous le savez, Madame, je n'aime pas trop jardiner,” began Monsieur Xavier. 
“Mais je suis fils de paysan.  Je sais jardiner.”
 
Narrowing his eyes, he looked toward the basse-cour. It was a cold day last December and the ground was hard. Incomprehensibly, our gardener Monsieur Martyn appeared to be scratching at the grass under the apple trees.
 
“You well know, Madame, that I don’t care much for gardening. But I am the son of a countryman. I know gardening.”
“Planting bulbs at this time of year!” he added, shaking his head. “And why mow the grass! It’s dead.”
 
But to our surprise, Martyn was not planting bulbs or simply mowing the grass. 
 
Martyn was preparing a prairie fleurie, a meadow. He was planting the seeds of yellow rattle, known as crête de coq in France because its yellow flower looks like a coxcomb. This is a weed.
 
“Is that gardening?” exclaimed Monsieur Xavier to me, indignant.

Our native wildflower meadow beginning to bloom, with plenty of dandelions. The Farmhouse is in the background. The bare-limbed tree in the mid-ground is a Normandy heritage apple tree.
 

Garden or jardin in French comes from the gallo-roman language that prevailed after Germanic tribes conquered the old Roman provinces of Gaul, now France. The word “hortus gardinus” means an enclosed place for cultivating plants. “Gardinus” was the Latinized form of the Frankish word “gart,” an enclosure. “Hortus” means a garden in Latin.
 
Like Monsieur Xavier, the Romans and Barbarian tribes thought of a garden as an enclosed space, an “enclos,” for growing plants. 
 
A garden is productive. It feeds us. Its enclos protects. Here, the rare and the fragile survive. 
 
Strangling weeds, roving animals, ravenous insects, and the vagaries of the weather are attenuated.
 
In the garden, Nature is kept at bay. Or recreated.
 
Paradise also means “enclosure.” It comes from the Old Persian word for “garden,” from "pairi" (around) and "daeza" or "diz" (a wall, brick, or shape). 
 
The earthly paradise of Cyrus the Great, built in 550 B.C. and excavated in the early 1900s, was a walled garden with an artificial steam. Fruit trees were planted in tidy rows. Lilies and roses were grown for their fleeting beauty and intense fragrance. On the other side of the wall was the desert. 
 
Creating an improved version of Nature, behind walls, is a persistent tradition in human history as well as in the mind of our gardien. It is surely no coincidence that the Garden of Eden, created by God for Man’s delight in the story of Adam and Eve, was called “paradise” in the early Greek translations of the Bible.
 
But gardens aren’t only a means of improving upon the works of Nature. They are a way of understanding it. 
 
A collection of plants turns the natural world into an abstraction. The first botanical garden in Europe, created at the University of Padua in 1545, is laid out with a circular central plot to represent the world. Around it is a ring of water to represent the oceans. 
 
At first, the garden beds displayed the familiar arrangement of plants by medicinal virtues and origin. Two hundred years later, Carl Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae created new categories based on close observation of physical characteristics. The botanical garden could now be a living catalogue of plants, an intellectual vision of the natural world, with plants arranged in families and lineages defined by the scientist. 
 
The garden nourishes, delights, tames, and teaches. And it expresses Man’s conception of his place in the world, from the favored creature in Paradise to an element of the biosphère.
 
This morning, I listened to a broadcast by a professor at the Institut National d'Horticulture et de Paysage, France’s “grande école” of gardening in Versailles.
 
The garden, Gilles Clément told his listeners, is where Man puts what is best and most rare so he can enjoy it. In the desert, that might be a stream of water and orange trees. 
 
These days, it is Nature itself that seems best and most rare.
 
We take the enclosure down and invite Nature into our garden.
 
Monsieur Clément is not only a man of the times, as a French intellectual he seeks the meta-narrative. The new “enclos” is the planet itself, for the Earth is a “closed” system. Ecology is the new “pensée revolutionnaire.” It calls upon us to change our ways, to use a hoe instead of an herbicide, to see the natural world in a radically new way. There are no weeds and no garden pests, just plants and bugs. And sustainability, not rarity and fragility, are the new garden norms.
 
I related this to Monsieur Xavier.
 
In the farmyard at Courtomer, I explained, Monsieur Martyn is creating a “nouveau modèle de vie,” a new model of life. He is playing the new rôle of the gardener, “le responsable du vivant,” the person responsible for living things.

The wild native fritillary, with its distinctive dotted cap, was the first bulb to bloom in the meadow.

We walked over to have a closer look. 
 
The yellow rattle, Martyn explained, is a parasite. Its specialized root structure, the haustorium, kills grasses by penetrating their roots and sucking out the water. This, in turn, allows perennial wild flowers to take hold.
 
Martyn sowed wild flowers in the meadow last month, in March. A couple of weeks ago, in early April, he put in a few perennial plants along the path we have mown through the meadow.
 
“Just to give the meadow a start, just to highlight,” he explained.
 
Monsieur Clément would not have approved. To the professor, the life-containing seed is the most fascinating and noble element of the plant kingdom. Martyn’s impatience is all too human. And perfectly understandable; a lasting, self-sustaining wildflower meadow requires years of attentive waiting.
 
The preparation for planting began last October. After scarifying the ground under the apple trees with a chain harrow and mowing the grass short, and then mowing it again, Martyn planted native bulbs.
 
The first wild fritillary showed its small, purple-spotted bonnet in February. Yellow daffodils have been springing up since. And the first bluebells appeared this week.
 
“English bluebells,” said Martyn, with a touch of proud nostalgia for his native land. 
 
“C’est sérieux?” muttered Monsieur Xavier. The common bluebell, of course, is as native to France as to the British Isles. We call it the jacinthe des bois, wood hyacinth. Although originally a wild plant, it has been grown in gardens for its scent and color since the 1500s. Carl Linnaeus described it in his opus Species Plantarum of 1753, and gave it the name Hyacinthus non-scripta.

This bluebell or "jacinthe des bois" is almost ready to open in our new meadow. Bluebells provide nectar to bees as well as to other pollinating insects and butterflies.

One of ours is a rare white version, added Martyn, bending down to turn the frilly bell upward. Only one in 10,000 native bluebells is white. You can tell they are true bluebells, and not simply a Spanish bluebell or a hybrid, because  H. non-scripta flowers only on one side of its stem, causing it to droop gracefully earthward. 
 
Also flowering mightily in our new meadow right now are dandelions, “dent de lion,” or lion’s tooth in French. Little Audouin, age two, is very fond of them. He carefully plucks off their heads.
 
“Weesh!” he cries, pointing to the dandelions that have matured into seedheads.
 
“You planted these, too, did you?” asked Monsieur Xavier of our gardener in an ironic tone.
 
But Martyn, after blowing a wish for his little visitor, was glad to explain that the dandelion needs no introduction. It was already thriving amid the grasses. As the orchard grass dies out, the ranks of dandelions will die back, too. Dandelions flourish on soils enriched, year after year, by decaying grass thatch. They flourish, too, on “disturbed” soils – and, of course, our prairie fleurie will not be tilled!
 
The colors and scents of dandelions, narcissus, jacinthe des bois, and the other flowering bulbs and wildflowers attract pollinator insects. This means more bees and butterflies to admire.
 
But these are not necessarily the most important pollinators. And as Professor Clément cautioned, in the new age of gardening and awareness of the biosphère, we must move beyond categorizing only some insects as “nice.” Even the mosquito has its fans; legions of fish, birds, and bats feast on them and their larvae.
 
More than the honeybee, for instance, the bourdon, or bumblebee, is an efficient pollinator. Bees fill little pockets on their legs with pollen which they carry back to their hive. But a bumblebee grasps a flower in its jaws, vibrates its wings, and covers itself in pollen. Eating what it can, the bourdon carries the remaining pollen around to the next flower. 
 
The beetle and the fly, we learned, were perhaps the first pollinating insects on earth. Around 150 million years ago, these insects developed long probiscis to drink nectar from the first flowering plants. Some types of beetle are still the specialized pollinators of magnolias and water lilies, which are among the most ancient species of flowering plants. 
 
Since we have both these plants growing in the parc, Monsieur Xavier nodded approvingly.
 
Some good pollinators are also excellent predators, like wasps and hoverflies. The emerging larvae of the hoverfly, “le syrphe” in French, feed on aphids which would otherwise turn suck the life-giving sap from stems and leaves of plants. 
 
Meanwhile, beneath the earth of our meadow are overwintering caterpillars and perhaps millions of beetles, ants, woodlice and other insects that make their permanent home in the soil.
 
Finally, there are the birds. All those pretty butterflies, industrious pollinators, and other invertebrate inhabitants of the meadow provide them with nourishment.
 
The extraordinary diversity of the biosphère humbles the gardener in the pride of his creation, I reflected. Martyn’s meadow reproduces through his diligent toil and art what Nature itself makes without effort.
 
“Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees,”
 
wrote the great English poet, in “The Glory of the Garden.”

I translated the verse into French.
 
“I like your Kipling,” remarked Monsieur Xavier approvingly. He likes to see a workman working, too.

With a paternal nod, our gardien bade Monsieur Martyn a “bonne continuation,” and continued on his rounds.

To Spring!

Au printemps au Chateau!

Elisabeth