The Great Tempest

Change and changelessness in the landscape...ancient trees, new plans… The Landscape of Courtomer, a series

Above: photographed this winter at Courtomer...bare trees, the entrance gates, a rainbow

One December night in 1999, the winds blew at 210 kilometers an hour. Or at least, that was the weather report in the morning.

Outside, it was pitch black. The rain rat-tatted against the windows. We could hear the wind singing through the trees. The lights began to flicker on and off.

We were having a glass of pineau with the farm’s former vacher, François and his wife Louisette. This was several years before Courtomer came into our lives. We lived in our family place in Poitou, a more modest establishment that we had purchased a few years before.

The century was about to turn. And we were dimly aware that, contrary to the old adage, the more things change, the more they change.

François had just retired. But this was more than a rite de passage for the property, it was a rupture.

François had been brought up in the gatehouse on the estate. His father had been the gardener. His mother’s family had worked for the château as tenant farmers for generations. Louisette herself had arrived in the house at age 14, as companion for an old lady. They had reared their own children in the long, low farmhouse across the driveway. One of their sons had died here, in a terrible accident, at the age of two.

The property was dense with the experience of life, the passage of time, the accumulation of memories.

Everywhere were the odds and ends of another era. Yokes for oxen in the tack room. Old horse shoes in the cobble-stoned stables. Empty wine bottles impaled on a drying rack, from the days when vines were planted in the grand potager. There was a cider press. Black cord, still attached to the mesh fence around the poulailler, marked where many a chicken had met its fate. Piled in a corner of the attic were schoolbooks, grimy with dust and cobwebs.

I found a talisman one day. It was a miniscule prayerbook that had fallen behind the radiator in the kitchen.

“That must have belonged to Anna, the cook,” said Louisette. At Easter, Anna painted eggs with red dye and donned her native costume. She was Polish, a refugee from the Guerre de ‘45.

The world of François and Louisette had changed deeply over sixty years. The War and the Occupation shook the legitimacy of the political model, social mores, religious practice of the past. Meanwhile, France boomed. Everyone had electricity, hot running water, and “le Frigidaire.” On the farm, a tractor took over from oxen and draught horses. The vineyard was pulled out; no-one paid wages in wine and kind anymore. And neither of François and Louisette’s surviving children followed their ancestors into agriculture or domestic service.

The garden had long since disappeared by the time we moved in. Years of hardship  –  the war, lack of manpower, the premature death of the pater familias, le choc pétrolier of the 1970s, Mitterand and the confiscatory policies of the 1980s -- had undermined the will to cultivate flowerbeds.

But there were relics. The trees survived.

There was an American honey locust with rare pink blossoms, a graft François’ father had made. In the parc were three holly trees with rare yellow berries.  There was a full-size Rhododendron ponticum. And there were superb blue Atlas cedars and lofty pines, planted as specimens.

We sat together in front of the fire. Our ears pricked as the gusts outside began to sway the flames in the chimney. The lights stopped flickering. They went out. We lit a candle; the lights came back on...for a moment. It was clearly time for the evening to draw to a close. With alacrity, our guests bid us adieu.

“Bonne année! Au siècle!” we cried, as they crossed the courtyard to their car, cowering from the driving rain.

The next morning, a huge cedar lay heaved across the garden path. Its great roots still held pieces of turf wrenched out of the lawn. It had narrowly missed the electric and telephone lines and spared the fabrique, the octagonal garden house. In the woods beyond the park, some of the pines had been split in two.

The tempest, more pitiless than time itself, had undone part of the legacy of past plantsmen. But we really could not complain.

Across the border in Limousin, a tourbillon had decapitated acres of woods. Neighbors had lost their most precious essences, specimen trees that had been planted other hands long ago.

And farther north, in the royal gardens at Versailles, the head gardener wept. Almost 20 thousand trees had been knocked over or torn to pieces by the storm.

Portrait of André Le Nôtre, who laid out the gardens and park at the Château de Versailles for Louis XIV in the 1680s. Trees that survived for more than 300 years came down in the Tempest of 1999. Château de Versailles, by Carlo Maratta

The legacy of Louis XIV and the great gardener Le Nôtre, who laid out the allées and bosquets that surround the palace and fill the Grand Parc, was in shreds. The rare specimen trees planted by Louis XV, an avid plant collector and amateur botanist, were ravaged.  A pair of tulip poplars from Virginia, planted in 1783 by Marie-Antoinette to commemorate the successful end of the American Revolution, were in pieces. Napoleon’s “pin de Corse” of 1810 was flattened.

As the century turned, history itself had been uprooted and shaken to smithereens.

We did not come to Courtomer for another six years. The old retainers were long gone. So were the gardens. We did not lament the violent passing of the estate’s noble trees; we’d never known them.

At Courtomer, the park was bare. It was out of proportion. A sequoia, which still stands, made an angular black mass in the empty field that had once been the parc. The allées of pleached linden were wildly overgrown. A huge larix languished in the cour d’entrée near the big iron gates. Skinny pines and a sickly evergreen magnolia eked out their existence next to the moat. We were not surprised, when we did arrive, to find that the woods were full of cadavers. Enormous stumps had been hauled into the underbrush and piled up for brambles and ivy to cover.

But all had not been lost in the Great Tempest. The plane trees were thick and flourishing. Several of these, and some of the doughty oaks, were clearly more ancient than the present-day château itself. They had been planted in the 17th century or even before. Horse chestnuts along the path to the Orangerie flowered heartily.

After Alain Baraton wept over the devastation of Versailles, the jardinier en chef and his team began replanting trees. Two decades later, the park and gardens have been almost entirely restored.

“I had the great fortune of knowing Versailles in the splendor of its maturity,” he said. The trees were then hundreds of years old, witnesses of history.

“I now have the pleasure of seeing the park in its youth, in a new century.”  Baraton also had archives with the original plans.

Last winter, one of the oldest oaks came down in a storm at Chateau de Courtomer. Monsieur confers with our gardien Monsieur Xavier over its fate. We'd like to have it cut into boards.

A few years ago, I turned my attention to the park and gardens of the Chateau de Courtomer. I was looking for the sense of the landscape, the traces of lost plantings, a way to integrate what remained into a new design and space.

I had begun to learn something of the history of the Chateau, of the events and people it had witnessed. Monsieur Michel, who worked here as gardener’s boy for the old Comte de Pelet, had joined the team for a few years. I came across a 17th-century sketch of the earlier Chateau and its formal allées. A watercolor, circa 1805, depicts winding paths amid small young trees. Engravings of 1861 show the park thickly planted with evergreens in the romantical gloom then in fashion.

And the landscape is familiar now. I’m beginning to see the fine old trees hidden in overgrowth, the traceries of forgotten paths in the meadow grass, to recognize the remains of an ornamental parc in the field behind the Chateau. I’ve seen the seasons come and go, the creamy blossoms on the horse chestnuts, the piles of fallen leaves.

The more things change, the more we begin to see what is changeless.

I’ve started planting. One day, I hope, someone will see these trees in their splendid maturity. And for now, there is delight in creating for this time, for this place, its own green world.

...to be continued

Au siècle!

Elisabeth

Newly planted last autumn, muguet de bois bloomed for the First of May in the garden of the Orangerie. Beyond the slate roofed Orangerie in the background, the trees of the parc.

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