Sans culottes in the rose bed The savage and the sweet...the rose endures...
We are making a flower garden...Part Three
Above: a page from the 16th-century manuscript "Le Jardin du Roi Très-Chrestian" Henry IV, dedicated to his Queen. The king's garden included this pink Rosa gallica lightly striped with white.
Chère amie, cher ami,
“Paestum!” exclaimed Viola’s father-in-law. “Of course!”
He had overheard part of our conversation last week about the ancient city on the Tyrrhenian Sea.
“Do you remember?” he addressed his son.
“When we went to Paestum? Those three Greek temples in the plain. The finest was the temple of Hera. You felt, in a flash, the greatness of ancient Greece.”
“But that was in Italy,” remonstrated our gendre.
The Tyrrhenian Sea is tucked in between the islands of Corsica and Sicily and the west coast of the Italian Peninsula. From this body of water, Phoenicians, Etruscans, Greeks and Romans spread their civilization to the wilds of what are now Spain and France.
“The power of proportion. The idea of harmony,” le beaux-père added in explanation. “Those astonishing frescos."
From the ceiling of the "diver's" tomb, discovered in 1968, at Paestum, the ancient Greek city devastated by Barbarian raids and then abandoned.
He shook his head in remembered wonder.
“But we didn’t see any roses,” he said with a laugh, returning to our recent theme.
Paestum was famous in ancient times for its rose gardens. And along with their ideals of beauty and proportion, the Greeks brought the habit of cultivating roses to Italy and thence to France.
We are creating a garden at Courtomer. From among the thousands of rose varieties and hybrids that crowd gardening catalogues, we are trying to make a selection. It is like trying to choose names for a baby. In the end, as we did with our own children, we fall back on family tradition.
Naturally, I will try to find one that resembles my great-aunt’s rambling white rose, the only garden rose I knew as a little child. It was probably a "Félicité et Perpétue." This, as the catalogue states, was bred in France in 1827. The first four roses I ever planted – "Madame Alfred Carrière," "Fragrant Cloud," "Blanc Double de Colbert" and "Variegata de Bologna" -- will also grow here. There was one for each of the first four children. I ran out of steam for the last two…but now I can make it up!
Finally, the context of Chateau de Courtomer itself requires thoughtful choices. Besides the soil and climate – which are excellent for most roses – there is the history of this place to consider.
Alleys of trees, moats and the canal are the only remains of man-made landscape on the estate. A path that once led to the huge sequoia on the Great Lawn is faintly visible. The tracery of garden beds in the walled garden mostly disappeared when we put in a septic tank. And the double parterre of roses beside the moat is the lingering legacy of Roger, the last comte de Pelet at Courtomer, and his mother, la comtesse Henriette.
At Paestum, it was not only the roses that had disappeared from the famous gardens but the houses in the town and the people who lived in them. Invasions and conquest had turned a prospering Greek colony into a Roman city and then, in the centuries after the Roman Empire fell, a devastated and pillaged ruin. In the early 18th century, amateur archeologists – inspired by the rediscovered cities of Pompei and Heracleum – had begun to discover what lay beneath the overgrown mounds.
Map of the ancient world, c. 550 B.C. Paestum is marked on the west coast of Italy. The cultivated rose is thought to have travelled from Asia Minor with Phoenician and Greek traders and colonies. As you can see, the Ancient Greek world brushed the south coast of modern-day France.
Our Chateau is no classical ruin. Simple human qualities…pride and humility, luck and misfortune, embellishment and neglect…have shaped it, rather than catastrophic events. But here too we touch a past way of life and a past way of seeing the world.
"Qui n'a pas vécu les années voisines de 1780 n'a pas connu le plaisir de vivre," the comte de Talleyrand is said to have remarked.
“One who did not know the last decades of the Ancien Régime has not known life’s pleasures.”
Talleyrand was a scion of the haute aristocracie, a prince. He was appointed bishop in 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution. A year later, he proposed the confiscation of church lands and approved the persecution of priests. As minister of Foreign Affairs after the Revolution, he shamelessly exacted large sums of money in exchange for arranging diplomatic relations with the successive governments of France.
Yet even this seemingly heartless cynic yearned for the lost sweetness of the 18th-century’s “art de vivre.”
The final decades of the Ancien Regime were the culmination of remarkable advances. Diderot’s Encycopédie popularized new discoveries and techniques. The arts and artists prospered. Literary salons championed wits, writers and les philosophesIT. Mozart composed and performed in Paris.Sumptuous silks from Lyon and porcelain from Sèvres ornamented the homes of lanoblesse and the wealthy bourgeois. Fragonard painted flirting shepherdesses and their shepherds on boudoir walls. The architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel created palaces and pavilions that were airy and light-filled. Furniture became comfortable and elegant rather than heavy and grand, made for the new, more intimate interiors. And Marie-Antoinette launched a mode for luxurious country living, including a charming garden around her “cottage” on the grounds of the palace of Versailles.
Madame de Genlis, a fashionable beauty and esprit of the sweet years of the 1780s, with a rose at her corsage. The portrait was painted in 1781. Many years later, after her exile in England during the French Revolution, she brought the first moss rose to France.
In this flourishing and comfortable period, the Chateau de Courtomer was rebuilt. In place of a rambling medieval stronghold, a symmetrical dwelling with classical details and proportions took form. Large windows let in plenty of light. Gardens were laid out and the park was planted with imported essencesIT, like plane trees, horse chestnuts, cedars, sequoias and pines.
And, surely, there were roses – as there were in the paintings, sculptures, silks, porcelain and furniture details of the time.
As we design new gardens, we have identified the roses that grew when the Chateau was a medieval estate. In those days, from the 11th to the 14th centuries, there would have been a hortus conclusus, an enclosed garden within the Chateau walls. Here, the seigneur and his lady, their intimate friends and business relations could stroll, dine, discuss les affaires and, of course, delight in the roses. These would have been the wild species that had been cultivated in France since ancient times – the Rosa gallica and the Rosa damascena.
Admiring the roses in the "hortus conclusus." From a 14th-century manuscript of Le Roman de la Rose, about the passionate quest for a perfect rose.
In the 18th-century, with its dedication to l’art de vivre, the “art of life,” the pleasure garden broke free of high chateau walls.
And new varieties of roses and other flowers were introduced. By 1580, the many-petaled rosa centifolia, or the Cabbage Rose, had been developed by Dutch breeders.
Tuberoses, hyacinths, daffodils and fritillarias had arrived with burgeoning European trade with the Porte, the entrance to the Ottoman Empire in the Near East. The tulip manie had already swept France in the 1600s before it took on renewed vigor in Holland.
Missionaries sent seeds from far and wide. The Compagnie des Indes, founded by Louis XIV in 1665, hired botanists to accompany their voyages to the Far East. And the Compagnie kept a botanical garden on the Atlantic Coast, not far from the boundaries of Normandy.
From India and China came peonies, pinks, and chrysanthemums. The first “China rose,” a pink-petaled repeat bloomer with evergreen leaves, was brought from China to Europe in 1752.
In the 1780s, an unknown Dutch breeder introduced the Charles de Mills rose. Like the Cabbage rose, it was a variation of Rosa gallica. Extremely popular and vigorous, it undoubtedly flowered in the gardens at Courtomer. It still grows today in French gardens.
Perhaps in the sweet 1780s, the new gardens at Chateau de Courtomer were planted with these rare and exotic plants.
But while the family at Courtomer put the finishing touches on their new Chateau and elaborated plant lists, France was advancing to Revolution. And the looters who attacked the Chateau in 1790 probably did not spare the flower beds.
Fortunately, the world continues to turn, despite upheavals in the life of plants and men.
Across La Manche, the English Channel, a botanical revolution was taking place. This included the rose. In the mid-1700s, the plant collector Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, launched a new dynasty of roses. She grew a “Portland rose” at her estate which had been developed from a rose found growing wild at Paestum, a hybrid of the old Gallica and Damask roses. Imported to France, it was called the “Duchesse de Portland.”
"My noble, lovely little Peggy," as one admirer called her, became Duchess of Portland and a renowned plant collector. She developed the first Portland rose. It was sent to the Empress Josephine for her collection at Malmaison. Note the rose in young Peggy's hat...it predates the Portland rose but shows us the fashionable appeal of even a single rose in the 18th century.
Meanwhile, the first hybrid between a China rose and Rosa gallica had appeared in England in the 1770s…Parson’s Old Pink. Also known in England was the moss rose, a Rosa gallica sport with scent glands clustered in a thick fringe at the base of the flower.
These roses, including the first Portland rose, did not appear in France until after the French Revolution. Emigrés returning from England and the Caribbean back to France in the calm after the Revolution brought specimens in their baggage. And the Empress Josephine, whose husband Napoleon had ended the Revolution, began a collection of roses at her château de Malmaison.
As we spend this dimming autumn afternoon sketching new beds for the garden at Courtomer, we remember that the Marquis de Courtomer was one of Josephine’s chamberlains…that the family prospered under imperial patronage…
Mais arrêtons! We must put down the crayon and close the catalogue.
Monsieur Jean-Yves, our farmer, is tapping at the door. The wild boar are in the corn, he tells me. And, as we can see from the library windows, they have also been on the Great Lawn, tearing up big patches of turf in their quest for tasty insects and little mice.
Barbarians at Paestum, sans culottes at Courtomer, and sangliers on the lawn…the garden at Courtomer is part of a long heritage of disruption and rebirth.
A bientôt au Château!
Elisabeth
View to the to old Temple on the grounds of the Chateau. Some rough pruning has taken place along the wall of the haras, the stable block, where the comtesse's old roses still grow.
As always, Heather and Beatrice (info@chateaudecourtomer.com and +33 (0) 6 49 12 87 98) will be happy to help you reserve your own holiday or special gathering at the Chateau or just to rent the Chateau, the Farmhouse or both. We have just a few openings for the end of this year and in 2023, and are taking bookings through 2025. We look forward to hearing from you.