One of the most pleasurable things about summer for me is visiting other people’s gardens: another, is lazing around in my own garden. If I am not careful, I can find that the season has slipped by without me making the most of it. So now I make a list in advance. It’s something I would recommend to anyone.  Last year top of my stops was Bryan’s Ground, a modern Arts and Crafts garden, set in the sweet spot where England’s Herefordshire meets Welsh Powys, near the charming village of Presteigne.

Bryan’s Ground is a garden of two halves: a three-acre collection of garden rooms, set formally around its Arts and Crafts house; and its counterpoint, a larger, landscape garden embroidered with designed events to the east of the house. It is the formal garden around the house I wanted to see because I am working on a thesis that the Arts and Crafts ideal has somehow wormed its way into the English psyche and has informed, in one way or another, pretty much all our garden making ever since. The garden here makes no apology for its antecedent but it is certainly not an historical reconstruction or a pastiche of another era – so what does it have to say for itself? I was really looking forward to finding out and I knew it would be a great place to start my exploration of what it is about the Arts and Crafts style which has got under our skin.

I have to come clean at this point – Bryan’s Ground is owned by David Wheeler, who is the founder and editor of the garden journal, Hortus, and Simon Dorrell, an artist and garden designer who illustrates the journal and is the driving force of the garden. I write for Hortus, as does a garden historian friend of mine, so we made the trip up from London together and were graciously invited to spend private time in the garden, followed by lunch. It was a privilege which had my stomach fluttering, a little like a school girl meeting a pop idol.

The atmosphere was fulsome and golden as David let us loose in the early July sunshine and, with no-one else around except we two, we could fantasise that it was ours. This is a garden which has been written about quite extensively with lots of horticultural references, all of which are interesting and inspirational; but I wanted to look at it through a different lens. How was this garden typical of Arts and Crafts and how did it differ? I was struck by certain themes: the importance of anticipation and surprise; the visual and emotional impact of the hand-made; the interplay between inside and outside; the balance of formality and informality; and lastly, cultural literacy married to levity.

The Bryan’s Ground Garden Guide sets out the history of the house and garden and the story of how its current owners came to be here. It’s an excellent read but I like to experience a garden for myself first before knowing much about it at all, so I went home with this as an elegant souvenir. One of the reasons I don’t like to gen up is that you only get one chance to see something for the first time, with ‘innocent’ eyes, just you and the work of art in conversation. The other is that I love a visual surprise – and Bryan’s Ground delivers this as one ‘room’ opens into another. The idea of garden rooms is an old one, in fact, you could say that in medieval times that is exactly what a garden was conceived to be, an outdoor room where nature was civilised enough for you to be in it safely. This concept went through several iterations before the Arts and Crafts movement claimed it, organising the space to relate to the architecture of the house and its principal views from the inside out. This rule has been respected in the changes that have been made here but the flow from one room to another has been designed so we are treated by something new in each space, something unusual or surprising, one statement following another with an energy that makes the whole a lively dance. I liked the theatre of it.

I suppose the idea of the theatrical could be applied to some of the sculptural interventions and indeed, the garden buildings. Set builders in the old repertory troupes had to magic up scenic art every week and this model of hand built, evocations of the imagined seem to me to be present in this garden. The Arts and Crafts Movement valued the hand crafted and a visit to William Morris’ Red House at Bexleyheath, demonstrates how productive, (surprising given how much alcohol was consumed), a group of house guests in a weekend or two of decorating sessions can be. It looks like they were setting a scene, a backdrop for the kind of life they wanted to live. The Dovecote and The Sulking House both were collective projects, one built with the help of friends and the later a fiftieth birthday gift to David. They too set a scene; the former referencing the local vernacular, while the latter goes on a Grand Tour of the imagination. We could all do more of this rather than succumbing to the ready-made, bang-it-together shed because it is easier and instant. I remember my father in the 60s made quite a large structure in our London garden from marine ply, inspired by the crumbling pink and ochre palazzi he had seen in Florence. Could an element of DIY be a feature of the new Arts and Crafts garden, an update on the protest against the uniformity of mechanisation?

The dialogue between formality and informality which went on in the Arts and Crafts garden scene also interests me. At one extreme architect Reginald Blomfield loved strict formality, while William Robinson urged using nature and ‘wildness’ as a template. In the past the Sunk Garden, a classic Arts and Crafts feature with its quartered parterre and central circular lily pool, (all on the original architect’s drawings), would have been ‘well kept’. David and Simon have brushed some modernity over it, not only heeding Vita Sackville West’s advice that a garden should have the strictest formality of design with the maximum informality of planting but extending that idea to fit the lifestyle and ecological concerns of the twenty-first century. I fell in love with the abundant and self-seeding herb fennel, Foeniculum vulgare, in the Sunk Garden. The tension between the formality of the Irish yew (actually, I think Irish yew always look like they are longing to escape their straight jackets) and the other topiary is both thought provoking and amusing. It is as if a naughty child is messing up a perfectly ordered, grown up sitting room – reminding us not to take ourselves too seriously. Then there are the two ‘battalions’ of deciduous hawthorn obelisks which are both surprising and a little bit rebellious – deciduous topiary is bad enough but created in a very inexpensive species too?

Formality and informality, a thorough knowledge of garden history, and gentle humour walk hand in hand throughout the garden: Georgian railing dividing the garden from the meadow beyond is punctuated by a wonky gate; a straight-lined Dutch inspired canal is married to a crinkle crankle wall; and even in the formally proclaimed Dutch Garden the water pool is not the expected Dutch canal shape but has been inspired by a dog-bone. But this eccentricity never exceeds its remit. The boundaries are made clear, geometry rules and we know who is in charge here: formality is the head of the house but informality makes him or her a bearable companion and adds sparkle to the relationship. This is expressed in the planting à la Vita but also in the visual puns: a bed which will never be a resting place, ‘cannon balls’ piled like a game of giant boules and teasels, those ubiquitous National Trust tropes for ‘do not sit here’, planted next to an inviting place to sit. I wonder if a sense of humour, fun or irony can be added to the features to be found in a modern Arts and Crafts garden?

A classic element of the Arts and Craft garden is the relationship between garden and house, a conversation between interior and exterior. In fact, this is one of the few defining principles of the style upon which everyone agrees – most of the rest comes down to a sort of feeling. Bryan’s Ground was built with this relationship in mind but for most visitors today this isn’t as obvious as it might be – partly because the vegetation is mature but mostly because we don’t get to see inside this private home. One of the thrills of this visit was that I did get that opportunity – and pretty exciting it was too. Looking out into the garden from the principal rooms and experiencing the inside-out thrust of the Arts and Crafts home was the cherry on the cake, proof of the pudding. It all works as it should do. Perhaps the best experience of this from the outside is to stand with your back to the window at one end of the Rose Walk and appreciate the sight line extended through breaks in the hedge to the Formal Garden and again, through to the Pool Garden. Today, the desire to live an integrated life with the exterior has led to an explosion of bifold doors being fitted and ever-increasing areas of glass – the idea of our homes being connected to nature has never been more popular.

There was another sense in which we had an inside out experience too. We all ate lunch outside under a covered terrace but we ran a little late and the garden opened to the public and suddenly we became an exhibit, an interesting little vignette among so much visual splendour. We looked out at the peopled garden and it looked back at us – and that’s what Bryan’s Ground will for ever epitomise for me, a place of exchange of ideas and imagination, the twin joys of inside and out and a celebration of people, history and the natural world – The New Arts and Crafts Garden?

Useful information:

Bryan’s Ground,
Letchmoor Lane,
Stapleton (Nr Presteigne),
Herefordshire LD8 2LP

Open on Sunday and Monday afternoons, 2–5pm
From Sunday 21st April to Monday 29th July.
Groups welcome at other times by prior appointment.

Adults: £6.00
Children: £2.00
Teas and plants available.

Website: http://www.bryansground.co.uk

The post Bryan’s Ground appeared first on Gardens and Other Stories.

Is there such a thing as a French national garden style? There are certainly some recognisably French garden types; such as the clipped formality of Le Notre, the exuberantly decorative potager, and the regional specificity of the gardens of Normandy or Provence. But can a garden be the epitome of a national psyche? For example, I think the French are deeply conflicted between cool, Cartesian rationality, and a passionate desire to just be wild, à la Rousseau. So, if a garden here was able to square that circle, and bring a satisfying resolution to the tension between formality and informality, the natural and the man-made, the cerebral and the emotional – would that represent the perfect French style? If that were possible, then Le Jardin Plume, in Normandy, created by Sylvie and Patrick Quibel, would, in my view, be a serious contender.

You get a sense of what the Quibels saw in 1996, when they first visited the site, by the surrounding landscape when you arrive for a visit today; flat, featureless and dull, relieved by a forested green horizon. Certainly not the most romantic landscape Normandy has to offer. There’s no razzamatazz around the garden either: no signs en route, no car park and no fancy entrance; just a farm track to pull up on, and then a gap in a trimmed hedge and an A-board, announces you have reached the right place. There are no clues to what awaits behind the curtain hedges – which, actually, is rather a lovely thing in a society which feels the need to shout about just about everything to gain attention.

The eight acre site is designed as a conversation (with no shouting): a conversation between the several gardens which make up the whole; between the garden and the agricultural land beyond; between the plants and the elements; between geometry and poetry. You enter via a plant nursery and then, there it is, the famous Orchard Garden, star of so many glossy magazines, and the largest and most innovative of the garden spaces. It is a great chequerboard of mown squares with the trunks of apple trees serving as striking verticals. The stark geometry of it started life as a rope stretched in an axial line from the house into the landscape. I love the practicality of this founding act upon which the whole design hinges. Paths describing a grid are closely mown, while unmown squares are left to grow wild, with seasonal interventions such as a mass of camassias in the spring. It’s an unpretentious idea which manages to unite the grandeur of Le Notre, the reason of Descartes and the humanity of Rousseau. It appears rigid but, change your position on the grid, and squares morph into diamonds and, again, into lozenges – a tableau where the actors include the elements, light and shade and the huge overhead canvas of the sky.

The grid is a strong motif which holds the more ephemeral elements in its arms. Grasses add texture and movement, as well as framing the orchard in architectural blocks. Presiding over this graphic ensemble is a rectangular mirror pool which has the quiet authority of a teacher in front of the class. It also acts as a fulcrum for exploring other parts of the garden. So, there it is – equilibrium achieved: discipline and the uncontrollable working together. A real pièce de résistance. Face the other way, towards the house, and the Summer Garden is a variation on the theme; resolving the tension between the strict and the undisciplined.

The Summer Garden is raised, just one step, above the Orchard; it’s a detail which counts. At first glance it could be taken for a conventional, box parterre, allowed to grow to an outsized chest-height. Observe a little more closely and you will see that each compartment is, in fact, open on one side and filled with blooms that take their time to perform and are at their best in late summer. The colour is dazzling – a palette of molten lava where crocosmia, helenium, helianthus, achillea, echinacea, nasturtium and others bubble, boil and explode, often escaping the confines of their cages. Restraint and abandon live happily together; each complementing the other.

The design of Jardin Plume owes a debt to two books and one garden maker. When it comes to an understanding of geometry and framing the Quibels say they were deeply influenced by Grammaire des Jardins: Secret de Metier, by René Pechère. For poetic inspiration, sensibility to wild nature and a spritz of the unorthodox, they studied Derek Jarman’s book about the last garden he made at his home in Dungeness, Kent. The garden maker was Henk Gerritsen, whose own garden at Priona Tuinen, (itself based on the ideas of Mien Ruys), was a revelation in how wild planting, in strong structure, could work as a template for a modern garden philosophy. The Orchard and the Summer Garden are versions of that template and, in a relatively discrete area, near one of the pretty barns is another – Le Jardin Plume, or the Feather Garden, which has given its name to the whole.

This space came as a surprise as I had always assumed that the garden takes its name from the dramatic late summer grasses of The Orchard, but no, this is at the heart of it all, a declaration of intent: strong structure and wild planting exemplifies the wider ideals of our modern era. Here, a hedge of clipped, green waves dances with a spume of veronicastrum, calamagrotis and other species chosen for their light, feathery effect, while sanguisorba and thalictrum plashes the whole with energetic dots and dashes. It’s another well-known set piece in this photogenic garden, which looks striking through the lens of a camera and has been admired around the world.

It’s pretty, and it is fun to try and capture glimpses of the lacy planting enclosed by solid folds of hedge, but I just don’t get it. I suspect it’s because I felt wrong footed. The garden sets a clear agenda and this hedge seems to represent a shift in the paradigm – it is not a strong and stable structure acting as a foil for something more ephemeral. Although solid in itself, it seems to be referencing something unstable, like a dinosaur’s back, or Hokusai’s waves or the rise and fall of life itself? The balance between logic and emotion seems to be lacking here – and I find it unsettling. But perhaps there is nothing wrong in that.

There is plenty more to explore, amongst which is The Autumn Garden. This was inspired by childhood and the feeling of being small in a world of giants. At its best this garden of tall, vigorous species becomes a jungle of stems, leaves and flowers for us to part as we explore, like adventurers in a jungle. It’s a powerful idea, bringing us back to our elemental interaction with nature; before we learnt to be designers or critics – when we just engaged in a tactile way with plants without knowing their names and likes and dislikes. Here the structural hedge is used to create a dark green box, and the wild planting is its filling of tangled emotion. There’s a conventional and slightly chaotic Flower Garden too and I liked a secret corridor of white rosebay willowherb, Chamaenerion angustifolium, whose pink cousin is so familiar to us along railway lines, the fluffy tufts of seed heads left to speak of potential new life.

Plume means feather in French; there is no need to spell out the link between feathers and the planting style here. Plume also refers to a pen. I like to think of this garden as representing both the feather and the pen – the textural and the graphic. The Quibels write that they hope they have reconciled those who like clean lines with those who like wildness. I would go further and say that they have managed the difficult task of handling the tension between the desire to be rational and the urge to be wild which underlies a great deal of French culture: they have indeed mostly squared the circle in their very French creation – Le Jardin Plume.

NB The Quibels use a restricted palette of plants which are all available for sale, at reasonable prices, in their charming little nursery. At the moment it is fine to buy plants and transport them within the EU, including the UK.
I visited in late August as part of a little tour I devised of gardens in Normandy plus Monet’s Giverny which is an hour or so away. I think this is a good time to visit the Jardin Plume because you get the full impact of the grasses, however, the flowers in other areas were past their best.
There are no refreshments available and local towns do close down on certain days so come prepared. Price of tickets at time of writing is 9.50 euros for adults – see their website for details and opening times.

lejardinplume.com
Jardin Plume: 790 Rue de la Plaine, 76116 Auzouville-sur-Ry, France

The post Le Jardin Plume: Squaring the Circle appeared first on Gardens and Other Stories.

Pierre Mortreux is young, hopeful and very busy. He is part of a new wave of thirty-somethings who are convinced by the view that work is not just a necessary adjunct to the fun stuff but a natural and essential part of a life well lived – and are determined to follow that path. For Pierre, this means working outside; getting his hands dirty in the soil and having a daily connection with nature and the land. I went to meet him in his two-and-a-half acre market garden at the foot of the magnificent, medieval walled town of Montreuil-sur-Mer, in the French Pas-de-Calais region.

The young man striding over to greet me looked like someone I had come across before, perhaps in a Renoir painting (By the Water, 1880). Tall, strawberry blonde and bearded, with a straw hat and serious-looking black-rimmed round glasses, that suggest both bygone times and current cool, he projected a romantic image. But, as we got talking, it became clear that he has his feet firmly on the ground. I thanked him for giving me his time and he graciously replied that it was a pleasure to share his passion – and it is obvious from the scale of the project before me that you would have to be passionate to work this hard. You could say that Pierre is part of a burgeoning movement which Paris Match has called, Les Nouveaux Paysans. These are young city dwellers who are choosing to leave well paid jobs to go back to the land – but on their terms. Unlike the self-sufficiency movement of the 70s, they are pretty switched on about the financial and social implications of this way of life. While they have high ideals, they understand there is little romance in poverty and use spread sheets and marketing strategies to plan and optimise their efforts. This market gardener knows where he would like to be in five years’ time.

Pierre tells me that he comes from an entrepreneurial family in the hospitality business but that his father always took him out into the countryside. ‘He is a chasseur ‘, a hunter, ‘I know that makes him a brute in some people’s eyes but, in fact, he is very sensitive to the environment and loves the natural world.’  Pierre knew his happiness depended on spending his time outside and initially chose to work in the oyster farming industry. However, growing food interested him as a fundamental of life, a service to his community. When he decided that he wanted to have a go at organic market gardening he understood that some training would stand him in good stead. He studied Maraîchage Biologique on one of the many practical training schemes provided by the French government, which gave him an excellent grounding – but Pierre also found himself a guru.

His business plan (no hippy-dippy approach here) is based on the best-selling book by Canadian, Jean-Martin Fortier; The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower’s Handbook for Small Scale Organic Farming. Fortier has been called the most influential man in the farming world of the last ten years. He has demonstrated that a well-organised and organic plot of just one and a half acres can produce a very decent income – maximising productivity and quality of life. Pierre is hoping to do the same. I asked him why he calls his business Les Mains Noires, black hands, – ‘because my hands are always stained with earth’ – and that’s the way he likes them. As per Fortier’s template, his plot is divided into open-air growing and polytunnel production. Outdoor crops are organised into six ‘jardins‘ divided into planches, or strips, measuring 25 m x 75cms, the right size for a man to work comfortably by hand. The earth is turned once a year with a petrol-driven rotavator, (he tells me he uses no more than thirty litres of fuel annually) but, otherwise, just the top couple of centimetres or so are gently harrowed in order to maintain a soil full of life and with good structure.  Pierre has invested in a battery of ingenious hand tools designed to make tasks like hoeing and planting a little easier. I quite fancied some of them for my own garden.

His two polytunnels extend his season for best-sellers, such as his range of tomatoes, aubergines and peppers. They also allow him to produce some crowd pleasers – exotic curiosities which draw shoppers around his stall at the weekly Saturday market in Montreuil, as well as the Michelin starred restaurants he supplies. It is hot and steamy in the tunnels in August, and pushing through a veil  of unfamiliar vegetables felt a bit like a tropical adventure. Pierre showed me his Cyclanthera pedata, also known as stuffing cucumber, burmese winged beans, Psophocarpus tetragonolobus, a bit like a mangetout, sweet banana melons, Cucumis melo, and spikey little Asian cucumbers, Cucumis Anguria – all of which were absolutely delicious. I asked if the marigolds were there for pest control and he smiled and said candidly, ‘not really, mainly because they are pretty.’

The work is hard and, in the growing season, relentless. This is just his second year so he has little money to spare and paid help is limited to a few hours a week; plus a bit of loving support from his girlfriend, Bérénice, whenever she is free to visit.  He starts work at 7am and finishes late but planting, weeding and harvesting is just part of the job – he has to be an administrator and salesman too.  And then there is the emotional side to working with nature. What does he do when a crop becomes overwhelmed by a disease, like the mildew I see which has taken hold of his pumpkins? Pierre shrugs his shoulders, ‘I don’t use any chemical solutions to problems, so I have to be both philosophical and pragmatic – I factor in a certain amount of loss in my plans, nourish the soil as best I can and hope for a better result next season. I also supplement my produce with stock I buy-in from other organic suppliers, especially in the winter months.’ He admits that it is not a life without stress but, he says with a warm smile, ‘I love it – I absolutely love it when someone says they have enjoyed something I have grown, it makes everything worthwhile.’

You can meet Pierre on his stall at the weekly market every Saturday morning in Montreuil-sur-Mer (a beautiful historic town which ceased being by the sea centuries ago and an excellent weekend destination just under an hour’s drive from the Eurotunnel at Calais).

Pierre Mortreux –  Maraîcheur bio
Les Mains Noires
19, rue de la Chartreuse
62170 Neuville-sous-Montreuil

Lesmainsnoires1@gmail.com

Facebook: http://facebook.com/pm.lesmainsnoires

For the full article on the nouveaux paysans see

http://www.parismatch.com/Actu/Societe/Les-nouveaux-paysans-1065188

For more on Jean Martin Fortier visit his website http://www.themarketgardener.com/book/

This article from The Telegraph  describes the charm of Montreuil pretty well:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/france/north/724191/Montreuil-sur-Mer-Weekend-to-remember.html

Image of Jean-Martin Fortier courtesy of  –  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21857348

The post Pierre’s Market Garden: New Wave – Old Ways appeared first on Gardens and Other Stories.