WEEKEND COLUMNISTS 
“The French build gardens and the English like to think that only they can plant them.” Is this bit of popular garden history true? I have been checking it out at one of those dreamy French country houses which activate the planting instincts of English gardeners as soon as they see avenues of trimmed limes and beech trees.
Near Bayeux and within sight of the “Gold Beach” of the Normandy landings in 1944, the Château de Brécy is a rare delight. Formal French designs for gardens are usually on such a grand scale that modern gardeners struggle to apply them to their own setting. They “force nature”, I was always taught, but at Brécy nature looks as if she has been happily seduced into submission.
Neither the house nor the formal garden is impossibly large but all the virtues of fine stonework and mathematical planning are in evidence on the three terraces, which ascend in due proportions from the main vista. Their former owner and partial restorer, the man of letters Jacques de Lacretelle, described the garden as the “finery of an Italian princess thrown over the shoulders of a little Normandy peasant girl”. It was thrown there in the 1660s and has lived on wondrously as the backbone for a medium-sized formal garden, which is once again at its peak. I wish I could inherit it.
Plagued by small black thunder-flies, I stood on the roof of the château with the present genius of the place, Didier Wirth, and asked him to take me through the evolution of the garden beneath us. Its mastermind is still unknown, although some have suggested a genius of formal landscaping, François Mansart, who worked earlier in the vicinity and helped to teach the great André Le Nôtre. Its patron is better known, a local man of law, Jacques Le Bas. His supplementary fees while in office would fascinate the modern British press but they were also the income on which his plans for Brécy’s modest house and its ascending garden of steps, parterres and balustrades was based. Their main vista is a triumph of rational French calculation and demonstrates that mathematical proportion applies to all houses and homes, whatever their extent.
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| Château de Brécy, near Bayeux, features intelligently sited green hedging, emphasising its strong architectural lines |
In her care Brécy first benefited from the attentions of French professionals in the preservation of monuments historiques. A lull followed, including a merciful escape from shelling in 1944, when Brécy was taken without a fight in the first flush of the Allied landings. In 1955 the writer De Lacretelle bought the place and set to work on the formal garden near the house. He reintroduced a smart box parterre and a formal pattern of diagonal lines for the main terraces, basing his patterns on drawings by the master designer André Mollet, preserved in the classic handbooks for formality of the period. Brécy began to smile again but its smile has been lengthened and greatly improved by Barbara and Didier Wirth, owners since 1992.
As we looked at their excellently chosen old roses round the church, I remembered the cliché about English planting and French building. Modern Brécy challenges it. At home, on the hedges of my English Old Vicarage, I have sheets of white flower from the apt climbing rose Rambling Rector. Beside the Church of 101 Francs the Wirths have Rambling Rectors too.
I had left for France while two valiant tree-cutters struggled to restore shape to my English avenues of hornbeam and evergreen Pyrus Chanticleer, a self-inflicted penance which drains money every two years. At Brécy Wirth’s gardeners keep a long run of hornbeams to the shape of a green cloister, complete with arched windows. They emerge on ladders through his cloister’s green ceiling and clip every twig in sight. Cones of hornbeam flank a path by the church, clipped so tightly that you could bounce a ball off them. My central avenues of hornbeam become so fluffy before their clipping that I have begun to think of felling them entirely. The difference is that Brécy’s hornbeams are cut three times a year from a French platform which makes mine at home look like a clumsy parody of a guillotine. Brécy is proof that hornbeam hedging, tightly clipped, is the right choice for sites in full sun, whereas beech hedging is best in partial shade.
Brécy is fortunate in its present owners. They have emphasised its strong architectural lines by intelligently sited additions of green hedging. Up on the main axis they have added formal barriers of limes and hornbeams in a style which struck a distant English chord in my mind. I remembered the excellent green lines of clipped double hedging in the Buckinghamshire garden of our famous decorator and designer David Hicks. It was not a random memory. Barbara Wirth had run the David Hicks shop in Paris and had been a good friend of the designer, whose garden had indeed influenced her own style.
Clichés began to become fuzzy. Here is a formal French garden with lessons in planting and maintenance for me, an English gardener. Its formal style is a supreme witness to the classic age of French planning but one of its recent initiatives owes a debt to an English designer’s example.
Happily confounded, I turned back to the garden’s unusual keynote, the shapes of globe artichokes modelled in stone for the garden’s impressively restored fountains. Wirth explained the underlying idea. Globe artichokes had been carved in stone near the top of the property’s Benedictine priory church, setting a puzzle for future historians. In designs for medieval Benedictine bibles the globe artichoke is not a symbol of the hors d’oeuvres awaiting us in a starred French restaurant in paradise. It represents our human relation to God. God is in the artichoke’s heart, below the layers of choking fluff and prickles. We are the artichoke’s leaves, surrounding his presence at the centre. Is that why I often find the artichoke’s heart indigestible? At Brécy, so magnificently maintained, I am happy to accept that the designs on the Wirths’ new fountains are telling us that the garden is very close to heaven.
