Feast of Flowers number 5

A recent trip to London illustrated the latest in my Feast - A Riot of Roses.

Who knew Brixton would be so floriferous (and smell so good)!

Heavenly!

Gardens of the Loire - Day 3 pt 2 - some potager!

And so to the last visit of our trip, I can't believe it has taken so long to document our adventures, but things have been so busy for me since we returned, work, teens, less glamorous travel and family health issues (largely now resolved). There is so much still to say but it has been interesting to have the time for reflection before composing these posts and this one is very much a case in point. Since our visit I stumbled upon Monty Don's French Tour programme in which he visited our last location and his comments have definitely added to my appreciation, more of Monty later (you can never have too much Monty!).

The last outing of our French trip was to Chateau Villandry, the 'most famous vegetable garden in France'. The weather had decided it was summer and everything was beautifully set off by brilliant sun and lovely heat.

The Chateaux was impressive and is open to the public with new rooms renovated and opened each year, but we were more interested in the gardens.

The Chateaux is surrounded by water which is used to irrigate the gardens and flows from the top, down through the grounds as an essential, useful and stunning feature.

The vegetable garden is a highly formal, structured layout of Box hedged beds filled with vegetables laid out in pristine rows of perfect specimens. Varieties are chosen for colour and form rather than taste, in fact very little of the produce is eaten or used, most is composted (gaps caused by a hungry cook picking for the table would not be tolerated!).

There are six sections each arranged around a central urn or feature and interspersed with fruit trees. You are not allowed to walk in these sections (perhaps they think there would be veggie theft!)

The idea of a potager is that the useful vegetables are mixed with the decorative flowers, so at each point where the main paths cross are rose covered, shady seats, sixteen in all, all flowering madly and pumping out scent...

...and each section is bordered by drifts of flowering perennials. This is a 'moonlight border', sadly the 'sunlight borders' had been cleared for replanting.

The best idea of the extent and layout would be from above, this shot really only shows about a quarter of the vegetable garden!!

But vegetables are not the only attraction at Villandry. There is a herb garden full of medicinal and culinary herbs,  lots of manicured topiary and a maze (which we avoided on the grounds that we would probably get lost and miss most of the garden)...

The gorgeous Sun Room was full of hot yellows and oranges, and had a star shaped fountain at the centre. The Hemerocallis and Iris mixed with Oriental Poppies was a real blaze of heat.

       

The delicate Cloud Room was planted with cool blues, whites and silvers and was full of things I would love - I really want some variegated Iris, and there were so many beautiful silvery shrubs.

The Iris's on this trip were unbelievable (see here), magnificent colours and forms. I have never been very interested in Iris's but now I'm inspired.

The 'Love Gradens' were in a bit of a in-between state. The planting that adds colour was largely over as it was, for the most part, forget-me-nots, so it was not showing to it's best. The clipped hedges were impressively clipped though!

We wandered up and down terraces and along vine covered walkways, and sat in the water garden under pleached Lime trees...

until it was time for an ice cream before we got back onto our coach.

It was a lovely visit, with some real highlights but there was something about missing about the vegetable garden and it wasn't until I watched Monty that he hit the nail on the head in my opinion. Vegetable gardens are all about growing, harvesting and eating. They owe their existence to the need to feed people and this garden doesn't. It really doesn't feed anyone, so it lacks that use, that intent, that soul. It is a rather static, immobile (but very beautiful) thing that has none of the busyness and industry that a vegetable garden should have.All  that said it was very impressive and inspirational, and I'm very glad we visited.

You can watch Monty here and hear his thoughts, although he visits Villandry last so you'll have to watch the whole programme - a chore I know!

Some extra facts and figures about Villandry:

Of 115,000 plants used in the gardens each year 50% are raised in their own greenhouses.
There are 1,015 lime trees that take 4 gardeners 3 months to prune each year.
If you laid all the box hedges end to end they would reach for 52km!
In the vegetable garden they use about 40 species of vegetable, from eight botanical families, and have 2 planting schemes per year, which in turn have to be strictly rotated.

Feast of Flowers number 4

Our recent trip to France provided opportunity for my latest Feast of Flowers entry.

So many colours - Gorgeous!

Gardens of the Loire - Day 3 pt 1 - Inspiration!

Our final day of gardens in France was the busiest and best. The weather decided it was finally summer and the visits were amazing.

In the morning we went to Chaumont, the home of the International Garden Festival. 

Open from March to November, the festival comprises 30 show gardens set in the beautiful grounds of the Chateaux. The emphasis is very much on concept and cutting edge design, with gardens pushing the boundaries. The interesting thing is that the gardens have to look fabulous for 6 months, unlike Chelsea when everything is aimed at the 5 day peak, with plants forced on and held back to hit maximum impact. 

The gardens were very varied, some more successful than others and some plain strange!

The theme set was Plant Collectors.

                     

The carnivorous plant garden, with the dangerous plants caged and no feeding allowed, approached the theme with a level of humour and fun.

My personal favourite was the  'Nuances' garden, which had the garden as art on the wall with a bench in a courtyard to sit and view it from.

The planting was built up to create a frame full of texture and restrained silver, blue and purple planting.

I love the idea that later in the season it might break out of the frame, spilling out into the plainness of the courtyard.

The Black Garden, full of dark planting with flashes of gold was planted around a central plinth with gold and black jewellery on it (probably the weakest part of the garden in my opinion). This was one of the gardens that felt very new - it will improve with age and some time to grow.

'Suspensions Climatiques' is a more literal collectors garden made up of shelves of plants in bottles, jars and boxes as if just collected. Some of the collection escapes to take over, like the gorgeous Clematis above.

But some of the collection was tiny and constrained in bottles so needed looking closely at.

'Le Jardin des Grains' concentrated on the seed collectors. Each plant grew from a collection of it's own seeds, and structure was added by sculptures made from garden sieves. It was interesting to see some of the biggest seeds growing into small and delicate plants and somme of the smallest seeds creating trees!

'Fleur Bleue' was very simple - a mound of pots containing a collection of blue flowered plants. Definitely something manageable for the domestic garden.

'Le Jardin du Teinturier' or The Dyers Garden was full of plants used for colouring textiles. There was lots of information about the plants but all in French (not surprisingly!) so my understanding was limited. However there was the most stunning wall made out of palettes and Kilner jars full of coloured liquid. I would love something like this - when the sun shone through it it was magical!

There was a garden all about clover with pressed 'lucky' 4 leaf clover in frames

My other favourite was a gallery style garden, with a slightly overgrown and scrubby garden with some images of a beautiful garden on a far wall. Except that as we looked it became clear that they were not images but angled mirrors and the beautiful garden was in front of us but out of sight! How clever is that - I love that twist.

The contrast between the visible garden and the invisible garden was  amazing. 

Gardens as art!

And then there was the gorgeous planting in-between the show gardens!

What a morning - inspiration overload, I can't believe we did all that before lunch!

There were so many things to see, to attempt to copy and admire.

Trend wise there seemed to be quite a number of carnivorous plants and lots of blue planting which means that I am bang on trend at the moment as my blue bed is in full bloom! I'm not so good on the carnivorous plants though.