French Provincial Garden Plants
When planning a French provincial garden, start by thinking about the French! What comes to mind? Good food, laughter, a certain arrogance, a sense of style, love-making, passion, fiery arguments, intense rural life hidden behind shutters … these and others are the emotional notes that need to fill your garden, as well as the visual, olfactory and design notes that will make your garden an intense experience. When planning your own garden, pick a place or region that you know or appeals to you, such as my own favourite Camargue with its little black bulls, running horses, marshes and wildfowl, the Riviera of striped umbrellas, high fashion, hot colours and wonderful seafood or Burgundy's wide rivers, vineyards and cheeses. This helps you narrow your plant and style choices instead of trying to fit a huge and varied nation into a few square yards. Get some holiday brochures (villa holiday pictures are often superb) and look at the colour of sky and sea, the size of plants and the stone-work, accessories and layouts used in the pictures, now you can begin to plan your own planting. The way the French provincial planting works is to have mass planting of flowers bordered with a solid structure, so you could have petunias and lavender fenced with white painted wood or roses pinned behind a hedge of English box (B. sempervirens). Vegetables and flowers mix indiscriminately, so have olive trees (Olea europaea var. communis) with marigolds planted in their posts or pear trees with garlic chives around their roots. You can try a cobblestone patio bordered by grapevine, fill in the blank side of your house with fruit and nut bearing trees interspersed with large swings and swing seats, an arch with roses on one side and a passion-fruit vine on the other, add container plants; cherry tomatoes, geraniums and lobelia all planted together in the porch, set a pebble bordered vegetable garden next to a tiny pond. The effect is simple and functional, chairs should be shaded by trees and surrounded by ornamental grasses, lavender and Oriental poppies which creates a perfect setting for an evening glass of wine or your morning cafe creme.
French Provincial Furnishing
The French Provincial style is very rustic, warm, deeply cozy and extremely appealing to gardeners because it is can be created on a reasonable budget. To develop this style, start with a key feature, such as garden furniture and work outwards as and when you can afford new items. After your furniture, buy some copper or brass pans, the kind normally found in the kitchen but they also work perfectly for the garden area – they can be as battered and elderly as you like because all you’re going to do is fill them with flowering plants and herbs or simply hang them on roughly plastered or rendered walls to give a traditional rustic feel. Architectural features such as rough stone walls and very coarse plastering are easy to organise. If you have a garden wall, render it with a rough pattern, paint it ochre or dusky pink and set an old garden bench alongside it. French provincial windows and doors are very narrow, often with shutters which will usually be bright and contrast with the surrounding plaster; lime green shutters balance pink or cobalt blue with ochre. You can buy cheap louvre panels in DIY shops and hang them up to make false shutters. Furniture details are quite precise for this style: chairs are usually oak or pine and carry carved details, often with a ladderback or woven rush seats. French fabrics, when new, are intense in colour and for the right feel they need to be faded, so wash new material in washing soda and let it dry outdoors, or even give a gentle bleaching (dilute bleach to 20% and brush over fabric unevenly with a large emulsion brush – leave for five minutes before washing) to soften the colours. Coordination is the opposite of what you want to achieve, instead aim to combine checks, stripes and plains with floral designs to give the right rural feel. Flooring tends to be clay tile, brick or stone. Accessories are for the French Provincial style are a lot of fun – try baskets, second-hand ceramics and Chinoiserie pottery, wire baskets, carved wood sculptures, old telescopes, fishing floats and other devices, wooden or china dolls and old playing cards (especially French tarot cards) laid under glass on a table. A hammock makes the perfect finishing touch.
Next time – plants!
What is Style?
It’s difficult to say, isn’t it? We all know that we’re supposed to have a personal style, but what it is, and how it manifests itself, isn’t so obvious. As we get older and move away from the insistence of fashion into understanding what suits us and makes us feel comfortable, our clothing style tends to emerge – we no longer look like all our mates, we look like ourselves (whether that includes Style with a capital S is another matter; if you’re one of those who wears drip dry shirts or track trousers, assume you need to work on your Style!) and feel uncomfortable if we’re pushed out of our comfort zone; whether that’s a WAGs tan and Manolo Blahniks for the school run, or wellies and a pushbike to do the grocery shopping.
Garden style though, is a more complex equation. It includes the limitations of our location, what we’ve inherited from previous owners, the input of our family and friends and our practical ability to grow things or maintain things. This means that although garden makeover programmes still top the viewing lists, and most of us have a clear idea what we want our green spaces to look like, our actual gardens still look very much as they did twenty years ago.
The easiest things to change in a garden are furnishings and fixtures, but often these are the last things we bother with, sitting on our ratty, saggy old loungers looking out at the sea of dandelions and broken gnomes, thinking ‘next year I’ll sort all this out …’.
To start with the simplest things, pick a furniture style that matches your overall ambition for your garden, invest in the best quality furniture you can afford, and build your garden (literally) around it.
Over the next few weeks we’ll explore three styles: French Provincial, Urban Chic and Hacienda, to see how you can makeover your entire garden on a reasonable budget and without making any design bloopers.
What is your garden style?
Good question. Most of us inherit our gardens, or they come with the house we fall in love with, and so - unlike our wardrobes and our love lives - they don't tend to get made over every couple of years! Here's a simple quiz to begin to define the elements of your own garden style:
1 - What is your ideal holiday?
A - A country cottage and a pub nearby selling home-made food
B - A yacht in a sun-filled ocean
C - A New York shopping trip
2 - Which of these makes a room feel lived in?
A - The smell of fresh flowers
B - Atmospheric music
C - A stunning couch with scatter cushions 3 - Who is nearest to your style icon? A - Nigella LawsonB - Madonna
C - Lily Allen
4 - Which of these couldn’t you live without?
A - Your family
B - Your friends
C - Your BlackBerry
5 - Who makes the best shoes?
A - Clarkes
B - Schuh
C - Jimmy Choo
6 - Is your garden?
A - Your escape from the real world
B - Your personal palette
C - Your favourite place to entertain
Total your scores:
Mostly A – your garden is likely to be cottage or traditional in theme, and to provide a place in which you daydream; the plants you grow are often those you remember from your childhood. Your style guides for the garden are Vita Sackville West and Laura Ashley.
Mostly B – your garden is an experiment in progress, constantly changing as your ideas and interests move. The plants you grow are probably those you’ve seen on television shows or in upmarket garden centres. Your style guides for the garden are Terence Conran and Diarmuid Gavin.
Mostly C – your garden is your stage, and your dressing up box. The flowers you grow reflect the way you see yourself and tend to reveal aspects of your personality. Your style guides for the garden are Laurence Llewellyn Bowen and Jinny Blom.
Garden style
It isn't that I don't like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.
-Vita Sackville-West (1892 - 1962)
And that quotation could stand as the marker of all that we try to do in our gardens. We like disorder, riotous colours, scents, borders spilling onto paths, we like laughter emerging from darkness studded by tiny candles, or kiddies shrieking with joy as they run through the sprinkler or splash in a pool, we love the happy almost-silence of our friends as they munch on a barbecue we’ve prepared lovingly to please them. We adore the sound of a summer afternoon as we recline in our lounger and browse through a novel with a chilled drink and an even more chilled-out lover nearby
But it all has to be judiciously arranged. Tatty borders look awful, shrieking children need to have towels to hand to dry their hair, a barbecue only works if the food and the seating, the drinks and the guests are all in the right place at the right time, and we can only recline and relax when we know we’ve got the rest of the setting right.
So this blog is about how we design and style our gardens, what influences us and how we can take the best from all the world and all its history and turn it into glorious opportunities to live in our green rooms. And it’s a chance to reveal and explore our personal style and experiment with what makes us happy and fulfilled. Or as another British gardener put it,
Don't underestimate the therapeutic value of gardening. It's the one area where we can all use our nascent creative talents to make a truly satisfying work of art. Every individual, with thought, patience and a large portion of help from nature, has it in them to create their own private paradise: truly a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.
Geoff Hamilton, 1997
