Châteaux leave Chelsea in the shade

Sun-drenched stalls at the Saint-Jean de Beauregard flower show

Under a clear blue French sky I have really enjoyed a flower show. It has charm, range, high quality and an excellent setting. It belongs in the diaries of all keen gardeners who can bear to leave their gardens in the best of May or September.

The Château Saint-Jean de Beauregard is about 30 minutes by road south of Paris. Its publicity describes it as a “château transparent”, which refers to its panorama onto the surrounding green gardens, not to its methods of book-keeping. To an English eye what is at once transparent is the active gardening of its owner, Muriel de Curel. She is a vicomtesse who long ago abandoned the limiting prospect of a life with earth-free fingers and unbroken fingernails. Her huge walled potager is amazing, so much so that I will return to it when the frosts have started to blacken my dahlias over in Britain. For 26 years she has also been running flower shows in her home grounds.

British gardeners are more aware of the flower shows at Courson, whose female genius is Muriel de Curel’s cousin. Maybe Courson’s medals and publicity are more organised but Beauregard claims to have been the first in the field. Together the two flower shows have transformed French visitors’ awareness of their own country’s nurseries. I was an early visitor to Courson back in 1993 and was already pleased to find unpublicised French growers coming out into the limelight. At Beauregard this year there were no fewer than 250 exhibitors and often I was struggling to recognise the plants and varieties on display. I know my asters but I have made a new French friend, the pale pink Aster Jardin d’Ailleurs. Keen gardeners like to grow hedychiums for their bold leaves and fine flowers in pots but only in France have I seen the red-flowered Hedychium rubrum. It is no surprise that this one has eluded us. It was given to its French nurseryman after being found in the Himalayas only five years ago. It is extremely handsome.

If you have a garden anywhere in France and fill the summer evenings by complaining about the local pépinière to other expats over yet another glass of wine, go off to Beauregard and get real. The list of exhibitors at the autumn show is a revelation. Tropique Production is the source of masses of hedychiums and some stunning banana trees, grown in Herm. The brilliant range at Sous Un Arbre Perché amazed me with masses of Saxifraga Fortunei, more spotted tricyrtis than I have ever encountered and rarities like Cardiandra with pink bells of flower which only have one supplier in our British Plantfinder. I am a sucker for fruit trees with long French names and in the Ile de France they can be tracked through Croqueurs de Pommes in Eaubonne. I could go on and on and write three entire issues called Comment Le Prodiguer for gardeners who want to know how to spend it on their second homes in France.

Twenty years ago the RHS’s Great Autumn Show in its halls in London was a lovely event. The dahlias were stunning and the outlines of my gorgeous autumn garden style were strengthened in dialogue with its exhibitors. Now it has shrunk so much that I no longer go. I will go to Paris instead. Here are four reasons why.

Beauregard has none of those dire show “gardens”. Nobody is exhibiting brutal concrete and purple thistle-flowered Cirsium as if they are the “way forward”. No homage is being paid to Beatrix Potter or some deceptive idea of a flowery mead. There are no wooden waterwheels and not a hint of a milkmaid. There are no transplanted mature trees making me feel deeply anxious about their well-being. There is not a rill or a mirror to be seen.

Nor is there a hot dog or a Chelsea Flower Show wrap with smear in the middle. The catering at British shows is expensive and only for the desperate and the captive. At Beauregard I stopped admiring big pots of purple-blue flowered Stokesia laevis, which British gardeners seldom grow. I rebounded to a stand offering Rillettes d’Agneau to all comers and advising on pots of peaches, soaked in liqueurs and combined with picnic delicacies. Producers grouped as Terres d’Eure et Loir sold me young lamb in jars and gave away a recipe for Agneau de Sept Heures à la Chartres. Nearby a stand of 10 different caramel dips rounded off a freeloading lunch. Two sticky spoonfuls of freshly-made caramel and chocolate set you up for another hour among commercial stands.

None of them is selling tat. There is none of the Suede and Leather Village that encroaches on the Hampton Court Show. No bird baths have been carted along in artificial stone. There are no bronzed garden statues of prepubescent girls doing dance steps for garden-paedophiliacs. Instead, in the charming covered courtyard on stone cobbles, I found Isabelle du Plessix’s hand-painted cups, plates and her brochure, which says, “Je suis porcelaine.” I asked if she really was porcelain or was there another side to the empire? “Bien sûr,” she admitted, “le mari.” As for the hats in the old stable area, Samantha Cameron could usefully go to Beauregard and raise her sights before the next royal wedding. At up to €135 they impressed my male eye as the answer to next year’s Ascot.

Lastly, the method of display. The exhibiting nurseries show plants in pots or in packing cases. The style is informal and so much closer to the village flower shows in which all keen gardeners are rooted. Of course the indoor exhibitors at Chelsea have their own daunting tradition which requires them to mass flowers in amazing profusion or to turn enlarged table tops into colour-coded mini-gardens. The colours and shapes at Beauregard are not trying to match that art. They are spilled out onto the grass or arranged on wooden slatted tables. I love to see individual tomatoes and apples in the round with handwritten labels telling me the variety is Grand Alexandre or Kardinal Trcyoni from Russia. I bet you did not know that “Le Jardin Nourricier” is the national theme for 2011 proposed by the French Ministry of Culture. It explains the emphasis on fruit and vegetables at this year’s Beauregard. Over in Coalition Britain the only theme is Presumption To Develop.

Those are my four reasons, but I also found a fifth. I have never met a mole catcher at Chelsea Flower Show but at Beauregard I have made another friend beside pink Aster Jardin d’Ailleurs. He is a taupier professional, employed to deal with those little gentlemen in brown velvet which try to mess up Versailles. Just you wait. You have no idea of the anti-mole devices I have just brought back on Eurostar and on which I will report when the winter molehills begin.

www.domsaintjeanbeauregard.com

www.domaine-de-courson.fr

www.sousunarbreperche.fr

www.croqueurs-de-pommes.asso.fr/en