A new gardener and an old idea

Chère amie, cher ami,

"J'aime à la folie présentement les jardins à l'anglaise...les lignes courbes, les pentes douces...en un mot, l'anglomanie domine dans plantomanie."

“I’m just crazy right now about English gardens…the curved lines, the soft slopes…in a word, Anglomania dominates my plant-mania!”
 
So wrote Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, to her friend, the critic and philosopher Voltaire. It was 1771. Under the guidance of Charles Cameron, a renowned landscape gardener, Catherine’s “English gardens” took shape. These included man-made lakes and cascades, sloping lawns, and the obligatory architectural elements – Greek temples and a pagoda.
 
Now, about 250 years later, our Courtomer is also having an English moment. 
 
At first, we just needed someone to weed. Those who had tried to lend a hand over the years never knew a daisy from a pâquerette. Salvia and coral bells, strawberries or iris; my cherished perennials briefly flourished and then were ruthlessly eliminated by la bineuse and glypsophate. Daffodils planted beside the moat were mown down, never to bloom a second spring.

Two years ago in March, in the last days of the pandémie’s curfew, Monsieur Martyn arrived at the Chateau. We knew little about him. Although Martin is a very common French surname, our gardener spoke little French. He came highly recommended by English friends in Poitou and the Perche, all of whom entrusted their gardens to him for seasonal clean-ups.
 
“I suppose it was a bit much,” Martyn reflected, telling me a little about his background. He and his wife and five young children had come from England to live a small farm idyll in rural France. They had intended to start a plant nursery. But there were distractions. 
 
“We had the goats, and then the geese, and then we thought why not a donkey, and chickens and ducks.
 
“And growing feed for them,” he added.
 
Martyn gave up farming. But, as Madame Francine has said on more than one occasion, “Vous chassez le naturel, il revient au galop.” 
 
You may chase away the natural, but it returns at a gallop.
 
Martyn became a gardener.
 
Martyn grew up in Lincolnshire, in an area known since medieval times as the Parts of Holland. Dykes and ditches hold the water at bay; there are windmills. Flat fertile fields, reclaimed in the 17th century by Dutch engineers, grow vegetables and thousands of tulips and other bulbs. 
 
The annual Spalding Tulip show, recalled Martyn, was one of the glories of his youth. Jimmie Hendrix came to play in 1967, although Martyn was a mere babe. His own sister accompanied the Tulip Queen on a float.
 
Our new gardener knows a daisy from a pâquerette.
 
“I could dig some manure into that earth for you,” he offered when he’d been en function for a few months. The ground in the center of le Manège, the circular driveway in the forecourt of the Chateau, is heavy with clay. I had planted oak-leaf hydrangeas and viburnum there. But even these tough plants were struggling. Our farmer led us to a long mound of rotted manure in the field next to the cour de bovins, the cattleyard. Martyn’s eyes lit up.
 
Our jardinier re-arranged the shrubs in the center of the Manège and added hardy perennials. Then, he staked the young plane trees I’d set out around the circle of the drive. He put mesh around them against the deer.
 
He replanted the border around the stone vase in the Orangerie garden. 
The roses were hand-weeded and dead-headed; pruning was put off for a year to allow the plants time to grow and strengthen. He planted water-lilies in the canal beside the Chateau. The first one bloomed in August.

But le végétal, or plant matter, is just one aspect of gardening.

Catherine the Great's correspondent, Voltaire, described his own plantomanie:

"J'ai de tout dans mes jardins, parterres, petites pièces d'eau, promenades régulières, bois très irréguliers, vallons, prés, vignes, potagers avec murs de partage couverts d'arbres fruitiers, du peigné et du sauvage..."

"I have everything in my gardens: parterres, little ponds, straight walks, crooked woods, valleys, meadows, a vineyard, vegetable gardens with espaliered fruit trees, from the manicured to the wild..."

Plants flourish and die away, as does the plantsman. The landscape endures. 

Voltaire, at his modest 14-acre estate near the Swiss border, and "la Grande Catherine" in her magnificent gardens and parks had in common the desire to create a landscape – the “jardin à l’anglaise.” The “English garden” turned to Nature and the natural world for inspiration.
 
Elaborate “broderies” made of colored gravel and clipped hedges, geometrical pools and fountains, and long, straight lines of identical trees were the fashion in the 1600s. A century later, the English landscape garden proposed lawns sweeping down to wild meadows, waterfalls cascading over rocky ledges into vast lakes, and woodland groves. Where garden-makers of yore had forced nature into artificial forms, the art of the landscape gardener was to imitate it. 

Hills were erected. Rivers were re-routed. Lakes were dug. The great new fashion of 18th-century Europe was a form of gardening which exalted “la Nature” rather than human “Raison” as a model.
 
Perhaps the movement developed in England as a reaction to the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, unleashed with inventions like Jethro Tull's seed drill of 1701. New methods of agriculture and new ways of work had changed society. The landscape was changing, too; “these dark Satanic Mills” had sprung up in “England’s green and pleasant land,” as Blake’s poem expresses it. Nature must be protected rather than subdued.
 
Yet this was hardly the situation in 18th-century France. The horse-drawn plow still tilled the soil here up to the mid-1950s. Parts of the country had been “en friche,” fallow, since the 3rd-century crisis of the Roman Empire.  Cloth was hand-woven in small ateliers or in farmsteads until the mid-1800s. 
 
Still, something fundamental had changed. 
 
The “parterre,” which had been imported into France by the Romans and again during the Renaissance from wartime campaigns in Italy, expresses an admiration for order and artifice. It was the model for the “jardin à la française” that Louis XIV made famous throughout Europe in the late 1600s. It was about straight allées and plants trimmed into geometrical shapes. 
 

On the left, "broderies," plantings that imitate embroidery; on the right, fruit trees are espaliered onto garden walls. From plates showing the making of the gardens at Versailles. BNF
 
In 18th century, on the other hand, the garden was to artfully express disorder, or at least “natural” order. It was set free from clippers and edging spades.
 
This was also the period in France when the theory of “laisser-faire” – free-market -- economics was developed. The idea of “liberté” fascinated French philosophers, including Voltaire. Freedom was a good thing. Order began to look more like tyranny.
 
The duc de Saint-Simon wrote that the jardin à la française at Versailles was where Louis XIV : « se plut à tyranniser la nature, à la dompter à force d’art et de trésors…la violence qui y a été faite à la nature repousse et dégoûte, malgré soi .”
 
At Versailles, railed the waspish duke in his Mémoires, the king “was pleased to tyrannize over Nature, to dominate it by force of art and wealth...the violence done to Nature repulses and disgusts, despite oneself.”
 
The duke -- whose château at La Ferté-Vidame was close to Courtomer -- hated Louis XIV. But his intuition that a garden reflects an idea about the world had many an echo.
 
In literature, the free expression of emotion – les soupirs, les extases, les transports -- was far more entrancing to French readers than the dramas of duty and stoic resignation that had thrilled an earlier generation. Rousseau’s “Julie” had displaced Racine’s “Bérénice.”
 
And Julie herself made a jardin à l’anglaise, suggestively called “l’Elysée,” or “heaven.”
 
"Vous ne voyez rien d'aligné, rien de nivelé... les sinuosités dans leur feinte irrégularité sont ménagées avec art pour prolonger la promenade, Tout ce que vous voyez sont des plantes sauvages ou robustes qu'il suffit de mettre en terre, et qui viennent ensuite d'elles-mêmes. D'ailleurs... c'est au sommet des montagnes, au fond des forêts, dans des îles désertes qu'elle [la Nature] étale ses charmes les plus touchants,” writes Julie’s admirer in Rousseau’s novel, La Nouvelle Héloïse.
 
“You won’t see anything lined up, nothing levelled out...the winding paths in their seeming irregularity are artfully arranged to prolong one’s walk...All you see are wild or sturdy plants that just need to be set in the earth and will grow without care. After all...it’s at the summit of mountains, in the depths of the forest, on desert islands that Nature shows her charms.” 
 
And as Rousseau noted elsewhere, “Face to face with Nature, man receives the all-powerful inspirations which lift the soul.”

The garden “à la française” was mathematical, geometrical, symmetrical and “unnatural.” Au contraire, the “jardin à l’anglaise” was a place of inspiration, feeling, and natural freedom.
 
"Vivre sans passion, c’est dormir toute sa vie," said Madame de Puisieux. She was a woman of letters, a contemporary of Voltaire and the Grande Catherine.
 
“To live without passion is sleep all your life.”
 
In the midst of these changing times and fashions, Courtomer slept.
 
Fellow Normans constructed elaborate English gardens…Méréville by the richissime financier Jean-Joseph de Laborde...Thury on the banks of the river Orne by the Duke of Harcourt...Ermenonville by an admirer of Rousseau...all are still visible today.
 
But at Courtomer, the family’s fortunes had unraveled. As Protestants, they had been on the wrong side of politics for two centuries. For several generations, the head of the family and his sons had been killed fighting for the kings of France. The old 11th-century château was half-ruined by the beginning of the 18th century. 
 
At Courtomer, there are no artificial slopes or splashing cascades. No man-made lakes or rockeries.
 
Ah well! 
 
As Napoleon said, “Ces niaiseries sont des caprices de banquiers ; mon jardin anglais, c’est la forêt de Fontainebleau, je n’en veux pas d’autre.” 
 
“These follies are the caprice of bankers; my English garden is the forest of Fontainebleu. I don’t want another.”
 
At Courtomer, we look up to the northern hills where a distant church spire might inspire us...we stroll along winding paths amid the trees...and we can contemplate the passage of time as the waters of own brook rush past in the park or the far pastures.
  
But I do admit to a fervent admiration for the "jardin anglais."
 
Last autumn, Martyn planted daffodils in the park. These days, in spring, the lignes courbes, the curved outlines of the woods, and the douces pentes, the gentle bank of the stream, are outlined in scattered gold.
  

                                                         To Spring! Au printemps!

                                                         Elisabeth

www.chateaudecourtomer.com