Apostles of the potager

The walled potager at the Château de St-Jean de Beauregard, near Paris, in late summer

The sudden drought has done as much to spoil the last of our borders’ flowers as any late-night frost. Since mid-September the south of England has had a notable shortage of rain. I promised recently to return to the planting of a fine French potager as soon as cold weather had blackened the dahlias. Drought has now browned them, so I will look across fondly to an excellent walled garden of fruit and flowers and my impressions before the weather spoiled the best of it.

At the Château de St-Jean de Beauregard near Paris I hope I shared my pleasure three weeks ago at the autumn flower show which is held around the house and its courtyards by the proprietress, the Vicomtesse de Curel. Several of you have written to endorse the pleasure of this excellent display and have asked for more about the adjoining walled garden. Like me, my correspondents have been hugely impressed by it. In the autumn sun I took happy notes on its contents as I wandered through the many beds which look as if they depend on an army of volunteers. In fact they are kept up by a team of two, Marie de Curel herself and her head gardener, a team who hit it off exceptionally well.

The effect is more flowery than veggie but is held together by long clipped hedges of evergreen box and by rows of pruned and espaliered fruit. The area is about two hectares. In Britain, such big walled gardens from the past tend to be seen as white elephants. They used to supply large houses which had dozens of staff, family and weekend visitors needing to be fed. In our slimmed-down age they are often left to rough grass and such apple trees as happen to survive. Last year I wrote about the recently formed Kitchen Garden Network in Britain which has set about advising and replanning a future for these problematic spaces. One of their best ideas is to plant the walled space heavily with ornamental fruit trees and draw on the help of local part-time volunteers. Over in France, Marie de Curel has enlarged my ideas of the possible, mixing flowers with fruit and vegetables and blending utility and ornament. 

In the early 1980s she and her husband inherited this walled potager which was mostly notable for its self-seeding weeds. Instead of shutting the gate on it and leaving it to go wild, she decided to act on her memories of such gardens as a child. She had grown up with a big French kitchen garden which had been rationalised by the landscaping eye of Russell Page. Like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at their French weekend retreat, her parents had turned to Page for advice on a workable structure for their walled garden. He laid wide paths and a firm backbone, advising on a mixture of flowers and fruit which would grow in the intervening sections. He had high standards for such gardens, as he exemplified in his masterly exhibit of a formally clipped potager with exquisitely trained fruit trees at the Chelsea Flower Show. It remains one of the outstanding outdoor gardens to have been staged at the show and, fortunately, Page’s book, The Education of a Gardener, has immortalised it in a black and white photograph.

Memories of Page’s advice guided Marie de Curel’s approach to the walled challenge before her. She widened the main paths. She retained and increased the fruit trees on wires. She saved the old peonies and had no hesitation in mixing flowers and fruits together. She could not possibly aspire to the neat perfection of a Chelsea Show garden across such an area but she could work to a vision of harmonious colours and appealing disorder. She trained her eye to look for neglected matches between flowers and fruit, the colour, say, of the stems of Swiss chard and the skin of a Williams pear. If some of the plants ran to seed and the greenhouses still sprouted weeds to the height of their roof, they could contribute to the general atmosphere, one of planned planting which is not prevented from developing informally as the year goes on.

To survey the whole, I took up my position beside a wooden gate in an old brick wall which had more than enough of a gap beneath it to admit an uninvited Pierre Lapin. I then admired the impact of a profusion of flowers and kitchen produce which would break the backs and willpower of many college-trained recruits. The annuals are excellent, many of them in shades of rusty yellow and orange which sit well in this brick-walled setting in autumn light. Orange dahlias mix with the rusty-coloured flowers of good perennial monardas. Yellow annual chrysanthemums or orange-flowered tithonias are toned down by white snow-in-summer and masses of the white cosmos which has just died off in my own garden. The zinnias are button-flowered in shades of white and rose-pink. Tall pink spider flowers, or cleomes, are also grown from seed and set out among rows of ornamentally leaved cabbage. Lemon-yellow antirrhinums cheer up the chard and crinkly green cavallo. In this walled setting the mixture of flowers and vegetables looks appealing without needing to be obsessively tidy.

I thought of the revival of the word “potager” in English garden style of the 1980s. It owed much to the example, writing and photography of Rosemary Verey, apostle of her newly designed potager in her much-visited garden at Barnsley House in Gloucestershire. In her slipstream, potagers started cropping up everywhere and nobody seemed to talk about “kitchen gardens” any more. The Barnsley House potager was well stocked with ornamental chard and curly lettuces but it could be challenging to visit it with its proprietress. The paths were narrow and their turns would have tested an expert parker in central London. The potager was on a smallish scale, though the cloches were wonderfully pretty.

At the same time as it was setting a fashion, Vicomtesse de Curel was revitalising a potager which has an altogether different scale and splendour.

Visitors to the Château’s flower shows can wander, as I have, through the vast extent of the potager and marvel how anyone can keep almost on top of it. Apples with names like Reinette du Canada and pears called Durondeau or Saint Michel add to the pleasure. None of them is available in Britain. Nor are the big tin water butts near ground level in which flowers of the dahlias are placed so as to float on the surface. It is such a chic trick, but it takes a Vicomtesse in a potager to practise it.