The Road to Le Tholonet

A French Garden Journey

Monty Don

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781471114595
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Gartenbau

This is not a book about French Gardens. It is the story of a man travelling round France visiting a few selected French gardens on the way. Owners, intrigues, affairs, marriages, feuds, thwarted ambitions and desires, the largely unnamed ordinary gardeners, wars, plots and natural disasters run through every garden older than a generation or two and fill every corner of the grander historical ones. Families marry. Gardeners are poached. Political allegiances forged and shattered. The human trail crosses from garden to garden. They sit in their surrounding landscape, not as isolated islands but attached umbilically to it, sharing the geology, the weather, food, climate, local folklore, accent and cultural identity. Wines must be drunk and food tasted. Recipes found and compared. The perfect tarte-tartin pursued. None of these things can be ignored or separated from the shape and size of parterre, fountain, herbaceous border or pottager. So this is a book filled with stories and information, some of it about French gardens and gardening, but most of it about what makes France unlike anywhere else. From historical gardens like Versailles, Vaux le Vicomte and Courances to the kitchen gardens of the Michelin chef Alain Passard. There will be grand potagers like Villandry and La Prieure D'Orsan and allotments and back gardens spotted on the way. Monty also celebrates the obvious French associations of food and wine and finds gardens dedicated to vegetables, herbs and fruit. It is a book that any visitor to France, whether gardeners or not, will want to read both as a guide and an inspiration. It is a portal to get under the French cultural skin and to understand the country, in all its huge variety and disparity, a little better.

1

THE ROAD TO LE THOLONET

It was October 1973, I was eighteen and heading for Greece with my guitar and a friend. We had taken the train to Paris and spent the first few days at a youth hostel, where breakfast was huge bowls of café au lait – in itself exotic – and baguettes. By stuffing a baguette into a pocket and supplementing it with a cheap camembert that grew increasingly lively at the bottom of my rucksack, we were fed for the day.

The plan was to hitch down to Greece, camping at night and earning whatever money we needed by busking. It was an open-ended arrangement. I had worked all summer on a building site and earned enough money to buy a new guitar,⁴ and I vaguely thought a winter on a Greek island would be something like Leonard Cohen writing Beautiful Losers on Hydra. Very vaguely.

There were two problems. The first was that I had little ability on the guitar and less with my voice. Even in an era marked by the abundance of truly dreadful buskers in every underpass and tube station, I was outstandingly, show-stoppingly awful. This evaluation crossed borders and the French paying public passed on by, wincing as I offered them my rendition of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and ‘Streets of London’.

The second problem was that my companion was recovering from a broken leg and was encased from ankle to thigh in plaster. This made walking practically impossible and getting ourselves in and out of cars – never mind our two ridiculously over-kitted rucksacks and camping gear as well – tricky.

At one stage we got a lift with the owner of a 2CV just outside Roanne, having filtered slowly across from Bourges. It took a complicated dance of shoving, straining and squeezing to get us and our kit into the car and, just as the driver cheerily turned to see if we were comfortable, a tent pole burst through the canvas roof. He was furious, drove in silence for a few kilometres and then booted us out. We stayed by the side of that road for three days, liftless, hungry and thirsty.⁵

Eventually we leapfrogged lifts through St Étienne, Orange, Montélimar (where I can still remember how irresistibly delicious a loaf of rough rye and currant bread tasted, broken off in handfuls and eaten at seven in the morning, standing by the side of a busy road) and on down to Aix en Provence. There we found our way to a campsite so we could stay for a few days before heading to Nice, through Italy and on to a boat across to Greece.

The weather south from Orange had been a growing revelation. This was 1973. Hardly anyone went abroad. My mother had never set foot in France and my father went once, in 1939, to kill Germans and then almost get killed by them at Dunkirk. He never went back. Other than the weekend in Paris when I was fourteen, the furthest south I had been before was the Isle of Wight. Now it was autumn, yet the sun shone from a blue sky. People were tanned, wore dark glasses and smiled a lot. Aix was full of people my age sitting in street cafés drinking lager, citron pressé or real coffee. There were markets filled with vegetables I did not recognise and crêpes for sale in the street. By existing almost exclusively on bread and cheese it was possible to live for just a few francs a day.

When it got dark, it was still warm enough to sit outside nursing a beer for hours. And the daylight was brighter and there was more of it than anything I had experienced or imagined. This light entranced me. The fact that there was heat attached to it was a bonus. It was the light that lit Cézanne and Van Gogh, both artists that I was obsessed by, and I knew that Cézanne had lived and painted in Aix. Those incredible paintings that I had seen at the Courtauld Institute in London and in countless reproductions were lit by this sun, this light that now shone on me. I felt blessed.

I did not know then that I was affected by Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and that the morbid, introspective gloom I sank beneath every autumn was as much to do with lack of light as anything else. No one did. SAD had not been invented. Now the southern light was raising the serotonin levels in my sun-starved brain, creating a kind of ecstasy I attributed to Cézanne. Art won over science, yet again.

After a few days of this there was a huge storm and the campsite was washed out. Our tent was a foot under water, so we gathered our sleeping bags and took shelter in the only dry building, which was the wash house. For forty-eight hours we hunkered down with half a dozen other people, wedged between the sinks and loos. It was all very jolly: with the rain beating down outside, this was camping as I knew it, and, carefree young things that we were, we had guitars, local wine at 4 francs a bottle (about 30 pence), a little hash, bread and lovely French cheese. We thought that this was living. There were no phones, no world outside that flooded campsite and its white-tiled wash house. The Yom Kippur War was raging, Watergate was building up a head of steam in America and the oil crisis was about to start a cycle of inflation and strikes that would bring down a series of governments in Europe, but none of this reached us at all.

Sharing our shelter from the storm was an American hitching through Europe accompanied by an entirely silent girlfriend who slept with him in his sleeping bag beneath the washbasins. It was a tight fit. He had done a degree at Brown University and spoke enthusiastically of student life. Up to that point I had no intention of ever being a student. I hated school and left vowing never to return to academia in any form, wanting to be free of all institutions. This desire was considerably helped by my exam results, which were so bad that no one would have me anyway. But listening to him I realised that there was a student world that involved self-motivated learning and a meeting of true minds. The fact that he was hitching with a girlfriend, albeit one who seemed never to employ her voice, and I was sharing my journey with an old school friend who was half-wrapped in plaster of Paris and not turning out to be much of a friend at all, showed the obvious benefits of student life.

I decided not to continue on to Greece. The truth was I never really believed in it. I had never met anyone who had been there and Leonard Cohen had left Hydra ages ago. But I knew I badly wanted more of the Provençal light and more time in Aix.

I had seen a language school in rue Gaston de Saporta, in the centre of the town, and, on a whim, went in and tried to sign up to do a course. It was completely booked and in any event there were fees. I had no money and absolutely no prospect of earning any, despite lugging my guitar around. But I decided to go back home, get a job – which back then was effortlessly easy – and retake my English A level at night school. That summer I had managed not just to do badly in the exam but to fail it completely. Not even an O grade. I knew that writing answers to questions I thought much more interesting than the ones actually asked had not helped but I also knew that this result was a travesty. The great awakening in that storm-battered washroom in Aix was that the world would not suddenly realise that I had been shamefully misjudged: I had to go and prove that to the world. Then with honour regained and the money saved from the job I would come back and spend a year in Aix, learn fluent French and paint like Cézanne.

So, up to a point, that is what I did, labouring on a building site through the winter, hod-carrying and digging footings by hand all day and resitting English A level at Farnborough tech in the evening. It was hard physical work. There were few machines, no health and safety restrictions and constant graft, often in foul weather. I would go straight to college from this work, slathered in mud and cement with a copy of Brave New World or Dubliners wedged into my donkey jacket pocket. My fellow workmen teased me for my airs and graces and fellow students steered well clear. But it paid 59 pence an hour which was enough to pay rent, petrol for my motorbike and a couple of new paperbacks each Saturday, as well as saving £10 a week. Best bitter was 13 pence a pint and half an ounce of Old Holborn and a packet of Rizlas about the same. Other than light, I wanted for little.

I got into the habit of rising at five thirty and reading for a couple of hours before going to work. It felt like time I was stealing from the remorseless mundaneness of Home Counties England. Quietly, before anyone was awake, I was slowly earning my passport out. That year I worked my way through the works of D.H. and T.E. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster, George Orwell, Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Gide and others. I was a sponge, leading a double life, soaking up a world that had ended before the war and was both removed and foreign yet accessible in the same way as France was from the Home Counties.

So the exam was taken, earning that grade I had previously assumed was mine by right, money was saved and in October 1974 I set off on the night train from Victoria for Aix en Provence. I was lugging an absurdly heavy suitcase that contained a Dundee cake and a jar of marmalade amongst the new corduroys, water-purifying tablets and immersion heater that clipped over the rim of a cup. Apparently my father had exactly the same two items in his kitbag when he set off with the BEF in 1939.

My grandfather, who had worked in Paris before the First World War, told me never to trust the word of a Frenchman unless it was written down. Ever. I had never previously had any kind of personal conversation with my father, although he did once teach me how to kill a sentry soundlessly with his commando dagger. Now, he took me to one side, muttered and shuffled a bit and said in too loud a voice, If you do any fucking, wear a johnny. It was hard to know which of us was more embarrassed.

I spent the crossing being quietly sick over the railings. We arrived at Gare du Nord at dawn and I hauled my suitcase on to the metro across town to Gare de Lyon. The train that was to take me on down to Marseille was due to leave from there at ten that night. I have no idea why I did not take a day train. Perhaps it was felt that the journey needed breaking. I do remember that I sent my suitcase ahead on a separate goods train. I suspect one could not do that now. I also remember my shock that the ticket to Aix cost 200 francs, which was about a week’s wages. But the upshot was that I had a long day in Paris with £100 in travellers’ cheques,⁶ to pay for my board and lodging until I had set up a bank account in Aix (which took weeks), and 30 francs (about £2.50) in cash. I was footloose, young and fancy-free in Paris, the most seductive city on the planet, with a wodge of money in my pocket, yet I felt anxious and alone. It rained all day. I had no waterproof. I walked for hours, revisiting the Jeu de Paume to look at the Impressionist paintings but feeling ill at ease and not connecting with them or anything else, not knowing how to use the empty day at all, but aware I was wasting it. Here, free at last, setting out on the adventure I had longed for, I was tired, hungry and feeling very alone.

I remember going back to the Gare de Lyon in the afternoon and double-checking that it was the right station. Checked I still had the luggage ticket. Checked I still had the train ticket. At the time I felt unsophisticated and hopeless but I now know that this is the underlying state of anyone who ever takes a bus, plane or train anywhere. All travel is riven with the anxiety of being taken to the wrong place.

Boarding the train as early as possible, I found my couchette, chose a top bunk and settled in. For fully an hour I had the compartment to myself but then, just as the train was about to take off, five North African men hustled on and took the other berths. In Aix I had been told stories of how Algerian men invariably availed themselves of pretty young boys at any opportunity: apparently anyone in the Algerian quarter of the town after dark was fair game. Girls would do at a pinch but boys were preferred. Sharing a space the size of a modest cupboard with five swarthy men who clearly had deliberately chosen this couchette – and me – for a night of debauchery, I felt alarmingly young and pretty. I lay there, spending the second night in my clothes, clutching my virginity and scarcely daring to breathe.

However, they quietly and politely turned to sleep and, eventually, so did I, waking at seven and slipping out into the corridor to find the train stopped at Arles and sunshine streaming in through the corridor window. The train headed south to Marseille and I remember the surge of exhilaration at the orange tiles of the roofs beneath the absolute blue of the sky, the cypresses and olive trees, all as exotic as anything I could then conceive.

I changed at Marseille and took a little train to Aix, hauling my case from the station, stopping at every corner to change hands until I found my digs at rue Cardinale in the seventeenth-century part of the town south of Cours Mirabeau, next to the thirteenth-century church of St Jean de Malte.

The landlady was ninety – so old enough to remember Cézanne but too old to hold on to those or any other memories – and the house had that darkness and smell that I learnt to associate with French town houses that had not sold their souls to the twentieth century. Electricity was used under sufferance. The stairs were terracotta polished by footfall and a silent maid. The furniture in my room was heavy and dark, with a four-poster bed and a jug and basin for washing. Breakfast was brought to my room at eight by the mute maid and a six-course dinner was served in the dining room every evening. This was shared with the other lodgers: a Swedish bodybuilder, two Americans studying French and, disturbingly, someone I had been at school with five years earlier. It was civilised, comfortable and hopelessly unsuitable.

After a week I moved to the country at Les Bonfillons, between St Marc Jaumegarde and Vauvenargues, where Picasso briefly lived and is buried. I bought a Mobylette for 1,000 francs. A thousand anything seemed a lot, although in fact it amounted to about £90, brand new and on the road. I walked into a shop, pointed at the one I wanted, filled in a form, paid the money and rode it away. The simplicity of it was beautiful.

Mobylettes – a 49cc moped with pedals so you could save fuel going downhill or on the flat – were absurd but ubiquitous back then, more common than bicycles. There was an elderly man in a beret with a couple of baguettes strapped across the back of his Mobylette on every street and country road. Most people used them for journeys of a few kilometres, but I went everywhere on mine, planning a trip each weekend that would take me, very slowly, to the Lubéron, l’Étang de Berre, the coast – as far as the two-stroke engine would go on a tank of fuel. It was not sexy or romantic or glamorous in any conceivable way, but it was freedom and that, there, then, was bliss.

I joined a rugby club and played a few games on the baked pitches of Marseille and Toulon. Then, at a home match in Aix, I got kicked in the eye and found myself lying in Aix hospital next to a farmer whose friend (mon vieux copain) had shot him in the eye when they were out hunting thrushes. It was an accident, he said. Could have happened to anybody. His wife, denied of suitable ingredients for her pâté, spent the night cuddled up next to him in bed. I was deeply embarrassed but impressed. They offered me a nip of marc from a flask and I can taste that clean, slightly musky mainline of alcohol in my mouth now.

My own right eye was lost in the taut black swelling that made the right side of my face the outline of a rugby ball. I asked why the other eye was black and was told that I had fractured my skull but they had every hope of saving my eye. Having had no notion that there was the possibility of losing it, this was a little alarming. I went for a pee and slipped on the large, slightly viscous, pool of blood on the lavatory floor. I was just nineteen, and terrified and thrilled in equal measure.

I did not tell my parents about the eye. There was nothing they could do and I guessed that they would expect me to take that sort of thing in my stride. The standard means of communication was an aerogram, which took about four days to reach its destination.⁷ Making a phone call would have meant going to the post office at the bottom of the Cours Mirabeau and queuing for ages to book a call before waiting up to half an hour for the connection to be made; you were then directed to a booth where the phone would be ringing – without any guarantee of it ever being answered.⁸

When it was established that my damaged eye had vision I was discharged with a large patch and rode home one-eyed on my Mobylette. After a week I could raise the lid a millimetre or two to expose a satisfyingly bloody mess that nevertheless looked back at the mirror. Sight saved. A few weeks after that I went back to have the haematoma cut out. They injected local anaesthetic into the eye to numb it. I flinched. ‘Come on, Mr Rugby Man,’ said the nurse with a mocking but incredibly sexy smile. ‘Be brave.’ The scalpel descended on my eye and cut into the lid like a fingernail scoring the flesh. I didn’t feel at all brave. They stitched me up, told me I was off games for six months until my skull healed and that the intense headaches were only to be expected and that I was lucky. Another millimetre and the eye would have been removed.

I moved into the centre of Aix and rented a second-floor flat in rue Portalis that I shared with the Swedish bodybuilder called Stefan who ran a complicated stable of three or four Scandinavian girlfriends, one of whom was usually leaving in tears, only to reappear seemingly unconcerned a few days later. Aix was full of students renting flats in lovely eighteenth-century buildings. We didn’t know they were particularly lovely beyond the fact that we liked them, but for most of us they were probably the most stylish, charming places in which we would ever spend time.

Rue Portalis opens out into Place des Prêcheurs, which had flower stalls every morning and a big market every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday when there would be stalls of just huge tomatoes, puckered and ribbed like pumpkins, piles of strange sundried tomatoes looking like rounds of shrivelled toast, ten different types of olive on dishes, and great vats of oil and little wizened old ladies in black with bundles of herbs from the hillside which they sold in twists of newspaper, oranges and lemons stacked head high and aubergines with skin as glossy and black as a guardsman’s toecaps, mounds of peaches and nectarines and apricots, little bundles of courgettes the size of sausages still with flowers bursting from their ends like flames, charcuteries of every imaginable variation set out in baskets with pieces to taste on little wooden plates, onions that were not just golden but bright red, and onions long and slim, and garlic – huge swags of pink garlic gloriously exposing itself. There were crêpe makers and sweet sellers, walls of nougat and strange Algerian sweets, and the cafés around the square filled with leather-skinned men smoking yellow cigarettes and drinking wine and pastis at eight in the morning. I never lost my wonder that such a world existed and that all I had to do was stumble from my door and take a few steps down the road to immerse myself in it.

I had been brought up in the shadow of food shortages and rationing. My parents wasted nothing and there was a culture of eating what you were given and being thankful for it. Foreign food of any kind was rare and only valued if it was the bastardised F...