On the right bank
Traveling across to France as much as I do it’s very hard to find inspiration for the garden. There may be small oases of gardening magic in Brittany but on the whole, the average Breton garden is grass, a few conifers, a vegetable plot and some marigolds.
They have too much space. I’m a firm believer that the limitations of space make gardeners inventive, but when you can buy land off the commune at 25 euros per-square-metre even their starter homes can have big gardens. That’s why Japanese gardens can be so interesting. They treasure their space.
Added to that there’s the cultural problem of getting served in a restaurant on a Sunday lunchtime in France. Our big gardening day of the week is Sunday, that’s when we get out in the garden dead-heading, weeding, mowing etc. The French spend theirs in restaurants not getting served for two-to-three hours. Arriving home at 4pm after a long boozy lunch, your first inclination is not to get the strimmer out.
In my role as part-time photographer for the Then and Now series I was in Paris last weekend to capture some classic images of Notre Dame and Place de la Concorde etc. One of the archive images was of the old Citroen factory next to the river Seine just south of the Eiffel Tower. Because the vintage image was an interior of the factory, I had no chance of matching it with the identical view today, which gave me ‘carte blanche’ to wander round and take a photo of anything that took my fancy.
While walking up a ramp, hoping to get an interesting angle on a water feature that skirts the southern end of the park, I came across this series of terraced beds. Not only did it use the limited space on the embankment brilliantly, it was typically French.
The French love to plant in a singular and linear fashion. They like rows. They like single flowers. Don’t give them a melange, (even if they invented the word) they hate it. At the roundabout outside Collinee there is the apotheosis of this theory. The local commune decided to soften the new road junction, so they planted two rows of trees opposite each other. There was space for clumps, for interesting planting, but no, they stuck those different varieties of trees in a nice, tidy row, side by side.
Twenty years later and the rapidly maturing trees are all fighting each other for space, jammed side by side in a line that makes little sense. (I’ll take a photo of it next time).
However the geometric and singular planting habit works beautifully in the Parc Andre Citroen, with beds of scabious and salvia tumbling over each other. It’s like a vertical nursery bed, a hardy perennial theatre. Or maybe (peut-etre) I’m turning just a little bit French...
