The lost garden...this week's letter from Elisabeth at Chateau de Courtomer
| Monday, March 8, 2021
Dear friend,
“Les giboulées de mars, » announced Monsieur Michel, cocking his eye at the clouds blowing fast across the sky. He knew we had to get started, before a sudden averse, a deluge, cascaded out of the sky. On one arm, he was carrying a wicker basket shaped like a coal scuttle, with a sturdy leatherbound handle. In it were a sécateur, its iron blades blackened with age and use, a serpettewith its sharp hooked blade, a honing stone, and, to his evident regret, un transplantoir, known in English as a garden trowel. His other arm was wrapped around a box of plants I had just received in le courrier, via mail order.
We were on our way to the walled garden of the Orangerie. In those days, when we had first come to the Chateau, the Orangerie was a despondent and disheveled shell. Through the mossy slate roof, bent into sinuous humps and valleys, melancholy drops of melted snow and rain dripped onto moldering plaster walls and the dirt floor. The old doors, panes of glass cracked or missing, muntons rotted, sagged from rusted hinges. The brick chimney tilted. Ivy curled grasping claws into mortar, pulling out bricks and stone.
“Aux temps de la contesse,” recalled Michel, with a brightening of his gentle brown eyes, the high-ceilinged Orangerie had been kept warm enough to winter over her lemon trees and pots of geraniums. And even longer ago, in the glory days of the 17th- and 18th-century Marquisat de Courtomer, the pineapple and the banana had prospered here, as well as table grapes and peaches. Once there had been a serre, a glass house for starting seeds and cuttings. The outline of the wrought-iron frame could still be traced on the stone walls of the Orangerie.
An old photograph shows the outline of flower beds and central paths on a wintry day in the lost walled garden of the Orangerie.
“C’était vendu par Monsieur le conte, » explained Michel, shaking his head. In an era of rising costs and reduced farm rents, the Chateau’s revenue had sunk. The long-lived countess had died in the 1960s, followed by her daughter-in-law. Her widowed son had sold the handsome iron framework of the serre to an antiques dealer from Paris. Michel had come to work as the sole gardener.
“I was 14 and I knew nothing about gardens,” he went on. “But Monsieur le conte showed me what to do. Un brave homme!”
Michel had worked in a garden that was then still laid out in the classic squares of a traditional potager. In the center was a spring-fed basin, where sun-warmed water was available for irrigation. A sundial on a stone pedestal read the hours. A line of espaliered apple trees, pruned along two wires, marched across the lower boundary. Pears were espaliered against the walls. At the foot of the garden was the Chateau’s bread oven, housed in a little building attached to the wall.
In his turn, the old count had been gathered unto his fathers. Michel had been dismissed the day after the funeral.
“But I don’t blame them,” he said philosophically. The fortunes of the family and their garden were on the wane. By a happy coincidence, Michel now found himself back in the gardens of the Chateau. He had been doing odd jobs for our farmer and was amenable to taking up garden tools again.
Monsieur Michel helped to plant trees in the park as well as flowers in the walled garden. Here, he is attaching a redbud to a tuteur, to help it grow straight.
By the time we had arrived at Chateau de Courtomer, all that remained of the Orangerie’s enclosed garden was a single wall. A muddy puddle had replaced the stone basin. Bereft of its brass sundial, the empty pedestal lurched to one side. Blue-flowered wild borage overran the old beds. Traces of blue-green copper sulfate hinted at the grape vines and delicate peaches that had once been trained against the walls. And suckers as thick as a child’s wrist grew from the espaliered fruit trees.
Despite the disorder within, the garden’s remaining wall still divided it from the basse-cour. As in classical times, the intimate realm of the jardin d’agrément was separate from the bustling commerce of granaries, haylofts and machine shed, pigsties, stabulations and dairy, the Farmhouse and the large central farmyard.
This distinction, between the world of crops and beasts and the precious clos, enclosure, of vegetables, fruits and flowers, is embedded in the French traditional garden. It reflects an ideal inherited from the ancient and classical world, preserved in the medieval monasteries of Europe, reintroduced from the princely villas of Renaissance Italy to the kingdom of France, developed to new heights during le Grand Siècle of the triumphant French kings, and transformed by their heirs and rivals, the Lumières of the 18th century.
Gardening was an occupation of noble leisure, distinct from the hard labor of the fields and pastures. The tone was set by the Roman emperor Diocletian, who famously refused to return to office after having retired to his country villa on the Dalmatian Coast in 305 A.D.
“If you could see the cabbages raised by my hands, you would understand the impossibility of such a temptation!” he protested. Cabbages, it must be noted, were then considered a particularly fine vegetable.
The collapse of the Roman Empire 150 years later brought an end to the pleasures of aristocratic country life in Europe. Parsnips and turnips were the staples of medieval cuisine, along with grains and dried beans. Meat was a luxury; salad greens were purely exotic. But as the final motes of dust settled from Rome’s catastrophic decline and fall, the garden regained its central place in French culture.
Charlemagne, France’s first emperor, issued instructions for more than 100 new or forgotten plants to be cultivated in his royal domains. Written around the year 800, the Capitulaire De Villis instructed the governors of Charlemagne’s vast realm to cultivate medicinal and culinary herbs and flowers, and such then-rare fruits and vegetables as lettuce and melons, chestnuts and the “Persian apple” or peach, roses and lilies, mustard, beets, walnuts, quince, mulberries and, bien sûr, cabbages.
Vegetables and flowers were to be cultivated in a hortus, literally “enclosure.” Fruit trees and shrubs were to be protected by hedges of hornbeam or box. The old distinction between the protected world of the garden and the rude world of farm and field was prescribed anew.
These pages from the French "Herbier" of a writer known as Pseudo-Apulus, from about 850 A.D., describe the medical uses of teasel and daphne. The introduction of new and forgotten plants into the early medieval garden was intended to be useful rather than ornamental, as would later be the case.
Michel looked down with deep suspicion at the box of tiny plants I had ordered from a catalogue. This was a departure from planting seeds purchased at our farm cooperative just up the road, or plants sold at the open-air marché held every Saturday in neighboring Sées. These were not the usual militant red salvia, fluorescent gladiola or hot pink begonia, grown to flower one summer and then be flung on the compost heap. These, I explained to Michel, were perennials. They would flourish against the walls of the Orangerie, mingling in light-hearted profusion with the stately espaliered pears. Here were coral bells and tall white phlox, a blowsy purple salvia and bell-flowered camassia, and spikey dahlias as splendid and theatrical as those on a Japanese enameled jar.
I thought about Charlemagne’s comment, two centuries before the first Chateau and grounds of Courtomer were laid out: “It is our wish that they shall have in their gardens all kinds of plants…”
Michel is extremely good natured. He turned his puzzled brow to the espaliered pears, which he had recently pruned and shaped against the old walls. He took up his transplantoir and began to make the first holes in the rich brown earth of our new border.
A bientôt,
P.S. The photo at the head of this letter shows the Park in late winter, seen from the roof of the Chateau.
Next week, more about the first gardens…both of the past and of the present…at Chateau de Courtomer.
We'd love to show you our gardens...and to welcome you to the Chateau. Please write to Heather or Béatrice (both are bilingual in English and French), or, of course to me, with any questions at info@chateaudecourtomer.com. We look forward to hearing from you!