March 11, 2024

Dear Valued Customer,

“Quelque chose pour la dent creuse!” exclaimed Henry.

He ladled an ample spoonful of jam onto his tartine.

It was one of the lively expressions we knew from a neighbor, missing many teeth herself, who was fond of cooking for hungry young men.

“Something for the hollow tooth!” she would say, prying open an empty ice cream tub to reveal stacks of home-made gâteaux secs. Hard work had made her hands large and gnarled her fingers with arthritis. But though her back was stooped, her movements were deft and efficient. Madame Celestine stocked her larder with home-made preserves, conserves, pâtés and four secs, buttery biscuits. She fed her army of cats and her flock of hens with leftovers. And she forked over, planted, and weeded her own garden beds.

Like herself, the potager was neither well-groomed nor new. But it was practical and the result of many years of experience. It was she who pressed upon me a clutch of tiny strawberry plants to put in our fledgling garden beds. She had been pruning runners from their pieds mères.

I tucked the strawberries in among flowers in the walled garden of the Orangerie. The undoing of this system was our first gardener. Weedkiller and vigorous hoeing were his preferred methods of spring garden work.

It’s been several years since those days. Raspberries and strawberries, along with old pear trees and roses, now grow along the stable walls in the haras. But at last, we are planning anew potager at the Chateau. It will be in the field next to the loge.

In the days of the last Comte and his horse-breeding ventures, the loge had housed a head groom and farm manager. The field had been a pasture. A rangée of new box stalls, dating from the 1970s, separated it from the park behind the Chateau. Stallions lived in the old Protestant temple in its far corner. They took the air in small enclosures outside the old holy place, behind tall walls of concrete slab. The effect, while not beautiful, was solid. The stallions couldn’t see their rivals behind the walls, and they couldn’t kick through to them either.

The stallion, their mates and the occupant of the loge had departed by the time the Comte died at the dawn of the 21st century. Poking through the box stalls and remises of the Haras, we found a cobwebbed sign for the stud thrown on top of an old oil tank. I resisted the temptation to resuscitate the Haras de Courtomer, and we did away with the slab walls.

But as we discovered when looking through old photographs, before its transformation into anequine greensward, the field had been an immense potager. It had supplied the Chateau withvegetables for the table. It grew fodder, like potatoes and cabbages, for the pigs and other animals in the basse-cour. The domestiques, those who worked and lived on the domain, grewtheir vegetables here, too.

By the time we arrived, only a handful of lettuces and a parsley plant grew in a tiny plot. It hadbeen carved out of the lawn in front of the Chateau, close to hand. The domestiques, like thehorses and pigs, the potatoes and cabbages, were long gone.

A new era had dawned at about the time the count transformed the grand potager into a grandpaddock.. The first supermarché opened in our département of the Orne in 1972, in nearby Flers. The courtil of yore, the enclosed garden plot attached to houses in village and farm, and used for home food production, was no longer a necessity. It was a luxury.

We had too many renovations on our hands to worry about a potager. Our old gardien plowed up a strip, now forgotten and overgrown, for his tomatoes and onions. The rough pasture grasswas mown as hay.

But now, with many renovations behind us and a new gardener at hand, I’ve been making sketches and marking pages in gardening books.

Having recently visited a vast kitchen garden with my sister, I have more ideas for the new potager.

The owners of this garden, both of whom have written successful cookbooks and own acountry house restaurant, had given full rein to their enthusiasms. Large pottery cloches coverthe new growth in the rhubarb beds, keeping the young stalks tender. There is an herb garden,a water garden, berry bushes, fruit trees, a maze, a shell house, a pond with duck houses and,out in a field, contemporary statuary around a gazebo made of shiny steel wire. There is acharming potting shed with an earthen floor. And an enormous glass house for forcingtomatoes.

My sister is an experienced garden designer and maker.

“I think less could be more,” she remarked, looking at me doubtfully.

A few days later, we visited another garden. This one is an archeological reconstruction, based on the actual 16th-century plantings and layout. Pollen from core samples had revealed the plants used. Excavated traces of garden beds, walls, wells, and tree stumps dictated the design.

“Very plain for the Renaissance,” I commented, expecting the elaborate “broderie” of early French gardens.

But this was not a garden for a châtelaine and her guests to look down upon from an upstairs window. It was a jardin nourricier meant for consumption. It was long and narrow, attached to the house, bounded with walls.

A simple parterre of clipped boxwood surrounded a tiny lawn with a bench at one end. Neatblocks of winter vegetables and herbs were laid out between gravel paths. There was anorchard with a strip of rosebushes in the center. A deep well dated from medieval times whenthe property had been part of a Cistercian monastery. There was a superb dove house on stilts.

“More practical,” suggested my sister. “Especially without the parterre.”

Replace the well with a spigot for watering, she added. “Plus, you already have a pigeonnier.”

The former Temple, deconsecrated following the expulsion of Protestants in 1685, became a dovecote before it was a stable. Niches for the pigeons can still be seen in the south-facing wall.

Nine centuries or more of history humbles one. I’m going to start small.

I have already started researching the vegetables, herbs and fruits that would have been grown when the

seigneurie of Courtomer was first mentioned in the 11th century. Newer varieties, introduced during the Renaissance years of war and trade, will have their place.

So will select subjects from Louis XIV’s Potager du Roi, created in 1678 by the gardener LaQuintinie. In the king’s vast “potager” at Versailles, courtiers and visiting dignitaries were invited to marvel not only at the sheer quantity of vegetables and fruits, but at exotic novelties, like the potato, pumpkin, and tomato from the Americas.

There was also the strawberry. The fraisier de Virginie was a delectable curiosity brought to France by Jacques Cartier, explorer of Canada, in the 1540s. Later bred with another American variety, the fraisier de Chili, the American strawberry gave rise to all modern garden varieties of the strawberry plant.

“On les croquerait à belles dents!”

With big teeth, we shall eat them. And perhaps share a few plantules with our neighbor.

At Chateau de Courtomer, we are taking bookings for 2025 and 2026. We still have a few opening for the Chateau, Orangerie and Farmhouse for 2024. Soon, we hope to open our "petite maison," the gatekeeper's cottage.

Heather (info@chateaudecourtomer.com and +33 (0) 6 49 12 87 98) will be delighted to help you with your enquiries and dates. And Jane will be happy to preview the property on site. She can also act as your concierge.

English and French spoken.

We look forward to hearing from you!