Sunday, March 24, 2024

Dear Valued Customer,

On the first day of spring, the blue and dark silver sky was streaked with vivid clouds. It was a balmy afternoon. A fine day for planting.
And as the Psalmist wrote more than a thousand years ago,
“Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.”

A clutch of trees lay against the wall of the stables. Earth, reddish against the soft green moss on the stones, still clung to the bare roots.

Nor far leaned a small pine tree, its ball of roots and dirt tightly wrapped in burlap.

Bare-root lime trees await planting in the *cour du haras, the stable block at Courtomer.*

The pépinieriste, who lives nearby in Vieux Courtomer, had kindly dropped them off on his way home the night before.

It had been so long since I’d placed the order, that I had almost forgotten where to plant these subjects. But our gardener was adamant. The naked trees must be planted immediately.

My first thought, a year ago last spring, was to make a lime allée leading to the Temple. This would give the lonely relic of ages past a presence.

The Temple stands on the grounds of the Chateau between the haras or stable block and what was once the église of Courtomer, now a truncated chapelle funéraire in the small cemetery of Vieux Courtomer. The church, edified in the 12th century, served the Chateau and its community until the mid-1800s.

French Calvinists built the Temple in 1622 and worshipped here 400 years ago. It is still a tomb for members of the family of Courtomer, buried beneath its floor. It has a swooping roof, stone walls, the tracery of arched, trefoil windows.

Unlike the little church, the Temple’s moment as a lieu de culte was brief. It was constructed in an interlude of uneasy cooperation between the French Catholic monarchy and la religion prétendue reformée, Protestantism. A mere 63 years later, the Edict of Fontainebleau brutally ended toleration of Protestantisim in France. Children were removed from Protestant homes. Protestants were imprisoned and their ministers executed. Places of worship were razed. Protestant résistants fled. Those who remained worshiped in the “Désert,” likening themselves to the persecuted Israelites in the days of Moses.

In a rare instance of royal favor, Courtomer retained its Temple. First, it was turned into a laiterie, then an étable. Rough doors were cut in to meet the everyday needs of the farmers who replaced the faithful. Holes were poked into the façade for pigeons. Its function forgotten, its dignity dimmed, the Temple was a farm building with a curiously impractical roof.

The intended allée would have loosely linked the Gatehouse at the end of the haras to the Temple. The spatial connection, I thought, would provide a new focus, setting both buildings en valeur. They would stand apart from the ensemble of stables, courtyard, rabbit hutch, poulailler, overgrown flower beds, wash lines, and other lively clutter around the loge and carriage bays. The old pasture then appeared little more than a terrain vague, half-abandoned and without purpose, its edges littered with a pile of broken concrete, twisted chicken wire fencing, and other detritus.

But much changed at the old stable block in a year. The Gatehouse is almost renovated. The loge, where the gardien used to live, will soon follow. The rabbits and all but one hen and three cats have departed. The improvised laundry line, strung from a telephone pole to an old pipe, was snipped, the pipe removed. Monsieur Martyn spent the waning autumn days tidying up the beds along the walls. He dug out brambles and weed trees, trimmed back roses and raspberries, pruned ancient pears and a volunteer cherry. As if heeding the stern advice contained in “Le Théâtre de l’Agriculture,” an oeuvre of agronomy published in 1600, he has tended new flowers and herbs:

“cultivées fort soigneusement, sans souffrir qu’aucune herbe estrangere se fourre parmi…
les sarclant souvent avec toute curiosité,
sans pardoner à aucune plante s’escartant hors de son rang.”

“cultivated very carefully, neither suffering the alien weed to wriggle in…
hoeing them often with supreme attentiveness,
neither pardoning any plant that strays from its proper rank.”

The field around the Temple is now a simple greensward.

Along its north side, the rectangular field is defined by a stream and drainage ditch. The line of new stables, built 50 years ago, bounds it to the east. The 17th- and 18th-century communs,comprising loge, stables, carriage bays, more stables, and the gatehouse limits the southern side. The Temple itself lines up with a dilapidated wooden stable and the edge of the gatehouse to the west.

From disorder, symmetry emerges.

In an opening in the high stone walls and buildings of the communs is the wrought iron entrance to the haras. Once within, there is a small courtyard on either side of the portail. Espaliered fruit trees, now free of suckers, and big clusters of hydrangeas grow against the walls. Roses planted in the time of the last comte, now neatly taillés, soften a low wall he put in to make a pasture for his horses.

Walking into the haras to give instruction to our gardener, I could see what I hadn’t perceived before. The ensemble of open pasture and buildings is now an entity. There is no longer much sense in planting an allée linking only the Temple and communs.

The three acres of grass, the distinctive Temple, the communs with their plant borders must take on a distinctive texture and form, I thought to myself. Unity of design; perspectives that draw the eye; the entire space must become a coherent whole framed but not dominated by the surrounding landscape.

With these principles stimulating my mind and eye, I paced around the stable block. The rim of hills to the north and east must be a far distant framework, not the end of an unraveling view. The hangar for the bales of enrubanage, although useful, must recede into obscurity. Perhaps a glimpse of the old church through a screen of trees would be interesting. There was the planned potager to consider. Above all, the Temple must be at once a focus of the ensemble and in harmony with its varied elements.

*Drawing of Temple as built in 1622, in "Marquisat of Courtomer, Ch. Verel.*

O Seigneur, que tes oeuvres sont en grand nombre,
Lesquelles as toutes faictes sagement:
La terre est pleine de ton domaine

“O Lord, how manifold are thy works!
in wisdom hast thou made them all:
the earth is full of thy riches,”

cites Bernard Palissy, writing about garden-making in 1563. Inspired by Psalm 104, he wanted to recreate a landscape where the Lord

“sendeth springs into the valleys, which run among the hills….
…[and] the fowls of the heaven have their habitation, which sing among the branches…
[where] He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth…”

Like the seigneurs who built the Temple at Courtomer, Palissy was a Protestant. At the time he wrote about a garden, there had been a massacre of Protestants in his hometown and a subsequent crack-down. He was in prison.

Palissy was famous for earthenware pieces colored with shimmering glazes of his own invention and decorated with lifelike moulds of frogs, snakes, shells, fish, and plants – perhaps they reminded him of the line, also from Psalm 104, “the great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.”

*"O Lord, how manifold are thy works!" Platter made by Bernard Palissy c 1550-1560. Musée du Louvre*

For Catherine de Medici, queen mother of France, and her powerful noble relative the Connétable de Montmorency, Palissy made tableware and gardens decorated with ceramic grottoes and figures. He was also a fountain-maker, expert on agricultural soils, and surveyor. He gave lectures on natural science, and is said to be the first person to identify a fossil as the remains of a once-living animal.

Staunch protectors and patrons, Catherine de Medici and Montmorency gave Palissy the title of “inventeur de figulines rustiques du roi,” rescued him, and brought him to Paris in 1564 to make more of his extraordinary objects, called “figulines” from the Latin for pottery.

Palissy’s letter was printed that year as a book, “The True Recipe, by which all Men of France may learn to multiply and improve their riches.” “En ce livre est contenu,” he writes, “the design of a garden as delectable as it is useful.”

Palissy’s garden, like many of his time, is a rectangular space, divided into four squares with two allées of trees in the form of a cross. Each square has a grotto made of stone and decorated with Palissy’s ceramics, as well as a “cabinet verd,” a green chamber made of trees. Water runs through the garden, circulating around little islands. There are useful plants like “naveaux, aulx, oignons” and “fefves, pois nentilles et autres telles choses semblables,” the standard contents of the 16th-century larder: turnips, garlic, onions, dried beans, lentils.

But the True Recipe is no manual of gardening. It is a polemic. And its garden is much more than a greenspace. It is a microcosm of the world. Here, God’s divine presence is not just felt, it is where divine will can be interpreted.

“Some people never want to hear about the Holy Scriptures,” wrote Palissy rather boldly, considering the times and his precarious situation. “But I have never found anything better but to follow God’s counsels, his Edicts, his laws and statutes.”

*Portrait of a resolute Bernard Palissy. Musée du Louvre*

In the center of the garden is a small palais, a palace. It is a refuge for persecuted Christians, an “amphitheatre de refuge, pour recevoir tous les Chrestiens exilez en temps de persecution.”

The vision of the garden itself, Palissy explains, came about “after the last terrible persecutions” as he was walking by the river.

“J’ouy la voix de certains vierges, qui estoyent assises sous certaines aubares, & chantoyent le Pseaume cent quatriesme.”

“I heard the voice of certain virgins, who were seated under certain trees & singing Psalm 104.”

This, Palissy explains, changed his gloomy thoughts into a contemplation of the sense of the psalm. “And since then, I have been thinking how to depict the beautiful landscapes described in the Psalm.”

Well before the Protestant leader Jean Calvin described the whole world as the “théâtre de Dieu,” in which God the master producer directs the play and makes the scenery, medieval philosophers saw the natural world as a kind of coded message from God. Meaning was embedded in every rock, plant, and animal. A garden was like a Bible made of pictures that even the most ignorant may read. A garden may make us think of Eden, the paradise made by God and lost through human sin. It’s where Adam and Eve disobeyed God and tried to gain forbidden knowledge by eating the forbidden fruit. But a garden is also a hopeful place. A garden is where good knowledge that is gained through observation and study, not through disobedience, helps the laborer to improve and multiply the fruits of the earth.

Just as God bade Man eat bread by the sweat of his brow in old Testament, so also He ordered Man to multiply his talents in the New Testament. And these talents, Palissy explains in his forward to the Connétable, can be multiplied through “quelques beaux secrets de la nature et de l’agriculture, ” the laws of science and agriculture. In the garden, divine creation and human invention conspire to create a delightful “plaisance.” Also, as Palissy promises to show in his book, “plus que quatre millions de boisseaux de grains…de plus que de coutume” -- a much improved grain harvest.

At the time the Temple was constructed, the elaborate “jardin à la française” was achieving its greatest heights. Kings, queens, royal mistresses, les grands of the French Renaissance had been inspired by the luxurious gardens of Italian princes. Formal parterres and marble statues abounded. Nevertheless, the growing of vegetables and fruit was also becoming an aristocratic pastime. Louis XIV would create his “Potager du Roi” featuring 25-acres of fruit and vegetables between 1678 and 1683. These, we add, were the years when our Protestant Temple narrowly avoided obliteration.

*A noble set of 17th-century arborist's tools. Metropolitan Museum of Art*

Bernard Palissy’s depiction of a garden that is beautiful, useful, and profitable was wider in its appeal than his Protestant vision. But both suit the Temple of Courtomer.

Meanwhile, Monsieur Martyn hovered, polite but adamant. The trees, he reminded me, must be planted.

We set our linden trees around the edges of the green rectangle. Two are planted between the outer edges of the Temple and the wooden stables. The other five are aligned inside the old pasture railings on the east side, facing them. Perhaps there will be time to order more trees this spring. If not, the rest of the green margins will be planted next winter.

And we will continue to contemplate how Psalm 104 could inspire the green rectangle of the haras.

For now, it is time to come inside. Twilight comes early on this Spring evening.

As the psalmist sang:

“He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going down.
Thou makest darkness, and it is night.”

A bientôt au Chateau,

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P.P.S. 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.

The Temple in the garden