Encore Provence

by Peter Mayle

  The climate, the soil and the lack of water were major problems; human nature, unwilling to wait for results, was another. Gardens created from scratch can take anything from ten to twenty-five years before they reach the desirable, photogenic state of luxuriant maturity. Plane trees, oaks and olives need much longer. The classic recipe for a lawn – seed, then mow and roll for 200 years – puts an even greater strain on a garden-lover's patience. It was clear that nature was sadly lacking in vim and acceleration, and couldn't possibly be left to her own devices. Who wants to spend a lifetime of summers surrounded by twigs?

  The impatience of foreigners was, at first, a source of local bewilderment. What was the hurry, why the rush? In an agricultural society, accustomed to the slow turn of seasons and an annual growth rate measured in millimetres, the idea of tinkering with the pace of nature was unknown. But it didn't take too long for the penny to drop, and the refugees' urge for rapid results eventually turned into a blessing. In fact, it has spawned an industry: instant gardens, shipped in and set up with astonishing speed, astonishing skill and, it must be said, at astonishing cost.

  More often than not, the process begins below ground level. Before anything can be planted, there is the question of what it should be planted in, and immediately we come up against the difference between fertile earth and plain old land. The first exploratory digs in the garden-to-be are not encouraging. Thin, parched stuff it is, more stone than anything else, sprinkled with reminders of the previous owner: fragments of crockery, rusty oil cans, twisted bicycle wheels, pastis bottles, the odd decomposing boot. That won't do at all. What you need, Monsieur, for the garden of your dreams, are tons – many tons – of good rich soil. And of course, since water is the lifeblood of a garden, an irrigation system to keep it from drying out. Only then can we commence with the business of planting.

  All at once, there are intimations of bankruptcy, and for some people this is the moment when they rediscover the simple charms of thyme and lavender, which manage to exist and even thrive without imported soil or imported water. But other, braver souls, more visionary, more determined, or just richer, take a deep breath, dig into their pockets, and carry on.

  Bulldozers to level the land arrive first, leaving behind giant banks of rocks and roots and any bushes unfortunate enough to have been standing in the path of progress. These unsightly humps have to be taken away. The removal squad is then followed by convoys of trucks – trucks piled high with earth excavated from some distant, more fertile spot, trucks packed tight with roses and oleanders and sacks of fertilizer, trucks with lawns rolled up like carpets, trucks with ready-made topiary gardens of box and holly, beautifully barbered into cones and spheres. And then there are the cornerstones of garden architecture, the trees.

  It is not uncommon to see mobile forests swaying along the roads before they disappear up secluded driveways. Plane trees to make a long, sweeping alley up to the house, olive trees to guard the pool, lindens and cypresses and chestnuts to charm the eye on a summer's evening. They are all well past their adolescence and into early maturity, their root-balls encased in giant tubs or bound in burlap. It's an impressive sight. It will be an impressive garden. And a truly spectacular bill.

  Over the years, pépiniéristes, or nursery gardeners, have sprung up throughout Provence like the buds of spring. They are even more numerous than real estate agents; hundreds of them take up eleven closely spaced columns in the Yellow Pages of the Vaucluse telephone directory. Their premises vary in size from a but on the edge of a small field to more elaborate establishments set among several acres bursting with growth, and it was to one of these that I went in search of inspiration and a pot of geraniums.

  The garden empire of Monsieur Appy is situated below Roussillon, a village with the flushed complexion of a face that has taken too much sun; a baked, ruddy village, built with stone from the nearby ochre quarries. As you drive down the hill and take the road to Gordes, the red-tinged earth fades into brown and the vines march across the fields in orderly, immaculate ranks as the land flattens out. And then, in the distance, the curved shape of a transparent roof can be seen above a row of treetops.

  To describe it as a greenhouse doesn't do it justice. It's the size of a hangar. A baby Boeing could be put in there to ripen and sprout wings in the warmth, and there would still be room for a modest jungle in the back. On one hot afternoon when I was there, it even smelt like a jungle; the atmosphere was close and humid, the whiff of fertility hung in the air, and it wouldn't have surprised me to see a monkey – no doubt gibbering in a Provençal accent – peering at me from behind a cluster of azalea bushes.

  It's rare to see so much concentrated green, or so many shades of green, every leaf shining with health – yuccas, gardenias, ficus trees with slender plaited trunks, annuals and perennials, improbably perfect shrubs. I felt sure that on a quiet day you could actually hear the sound of them growing – a moist whisper – but the days are seldom that quiet. Men are constantly on the move between the long rows with barrows and trays of plants. Garden designers with their clients refer to landscape plans and make notes, occasionally running their fingers through the hair of a particularly well-endowed fern. Trucks and cars come and go by the entrance, loading up with the contents of future flowerbeds and ornamental shrubberies. It's a remarkable enterprise, the furthest thing one could imagine from nature in the raw, an enormous display of disciplined cultivation; and that's just the main greenhouse.

  Larger and more hardy specimens are kept on the other side of the road. This is the forest department, where you will find hundred-year-old olives and twenty-foot cypresses, rows of them, next to just about every other kind of tree that can survive in Provence. To one side is the topiary headquarters, filled with box clipped into boules and pyramids and rather stout, long-necked birds. I saw one extraordinary bush that had been fashioned into the form of a snake. It must have been a good five feet tall, and, according to my amateur calculations, at least sixty years old. My experience with box is that it grows little more than an inch a year. But then, I don't have the green thumb of Monsieur Appy.

  He's usually there, genial and immensely knowledgeable, darting among his plants and clients dispensing advice on everything from bonemeal to slug control, helping to load your car while giving you a five-minute course on pruning. There's a noticeable twinkle to his eye, and judging by the size of his business he has much to twinkle about. He deserves his success. I can't think of a better place to go if you want to turn an unpromising patch of scrub into a small green masterpiece. Or even a large green masterpiece, a modern Versailles.

  I have mixed feelings about gardens on the grand scale. I can't help admiring the effort, the optimism, the investment, the skill of the pépiniériste and the end results, which are often superb. I've seen some of them, and you would swear they had been established in the nineteenth century rather than a few years ago. But would I want a garden like that, with its constant need to be nourished by a mulch of 500-franc notes? I don't think so. It would be a full-time job and an endless responsibility trying to keep nature under control, and I know that nature would win; she has more stamina than I do, and never stops for lunch.

  Some time ago I decided that Versailles was not for me. I would be happy to settle for something less grandiose and more manageable, and I've been lucky enough to find just the man to help me.

  Jean-Luc Danneyrolles specializes in the edible garden, the potager. Other gardening experts and landscape artists will have you swooning at their descriptions of vistas and arbours, leafy walkways and pleached limes; Jean-Luc can go into raptures over a carrot.

  I first heard about him from a friend. The two of them were taking a winter walk when Jean-Luc suddenly stopped as he came to a seemingly ordinary oak, wind-blown and stunted like hundreds of others. But he had noticed a roughly circular, burnt-looking area of earth around the base of the tree. Dropping down on all-fours, he sniffed the earth, scratched at the surface, sniffed again. Then he du
g down with his hands, very gently, and came up with a truffle.

  Having heard the story, I couldn't wait to meet him. I imagined a mythic creature, half man, half hound, a human version of one of Bernard's truffle dogs, low-slung and hirsute, possibly with a large wet nose. When we finally did meet, the reality was considerably more handsome: thick black hair, penetrating brown eyes and a smile that would do credit to a Hollywood dentist. Reassuringly human. And yet, as I came to know him, I noticed something about Jean-Luc that set him apart from other men, even other men who collaborate with nature to make their living. He has a quite uncanny affinity with the earth; almost as if he can see through it. He is able, for instance, to walk across a piece of land that hundreds have walked across before and find something nobody else has found.

  We were in his office one day – a gardener's office with boots in the corner, packets of seeds in the filing drawers and the clean, sharp scent of burning eucalyptus coming from an iron stove – when he asked if I would like to see what he called his icons. They were chippings from history, all of them discovered by Jean-Luc in the fields around his house. It's an area that he describes as a poubelle antique, or an ancient rubbish dump, a respository of bits and pieces lost or discarded in the course of 6,000 years or so of human habitation.

  He picked out a selection of miniature axe-heads, some no bigger than a book of matches. They were stones gathered long ago from the bed of the Durance river, then shaped, sharpened and polished until they had the dull gleam of oiled slate. They looked like infant tomahawks, obviously too small to have been used as weapons. In fact, they were tools made by neolithic man, ‘the inventor of agriculture’, and used as we would use a mechanical brush-cutter today to clear tangles of light undergrowth. Gardening must have been a quieter business altogether in the Stone Age.

  Jean-Luc laid more discoveries out on the table, and we changed civilizations. There were Roman coins, slightly frayed at the edges by the wear of centuries, but still bearing recognizable images. On one, the blurred profile was identified by a few legible letters as Augustus Caesar; on another, the form of a woman seated beside an amphora. There was part of a life-sized marble finger from a statue. There was a perfectly cut cube of deep-blue mosaic. And there were dozens of terracotta fragments, some inscribed with the names of their Roman makers, some merely marked with a broad straight groove left by a Roman thumb.

  ‘What do you make of that?’ Jean-Luc grinned as he pushed an almost flat, almost square piece of pottery across the table. It was smaller than the palm of my hand, a tiny but clearly detailed study of a naked couple – shown from the head down, presumably for the sake of their reputations – caught enjoying a moment of sexual acrobatics. A Roman dirty joke. Was it part of a dish, brought out on appropriate occasions? And what were they? Orgies? Weddings? Bar mitzvahs? Or was it just typical of the style of the age, the kind of everyday decorative refinement that any genteel middle-class Roman family would be happy to put on the table when the neighbours came round for dinner?

  It felt strange to hold this in my hand and look through the window at the modern world: telegraph poles, a parked car, a tarmac road. Man had been living here, exactly where we were sitting, for thousands of years, leaving behind relics of the kind that we put in museums: art and artefacts, often fascinating and sometimes beautiful. I couldn't imagine that the leavings of the twentieth century – the blobs of plastic and metal and the assortment of nuclear souvenirs – would hold the same interest.

  I asked Jean-Luc how he could explain his success in finding what other people had overlooked. ‘C'est le regard du jardinier,’ he said. The gardener's eye, which studies the earth instead of just looking at it. I know it's not as simple as that, but he insists that it is. For him, part-time archaeology is no more than a hobby.

  Work is vegetables. Most Saturday mornings, he is at his stand in Apt market, where he sells his produce. All of it is raised à la façon biologique – that is, without the dubious benefits of chemicals: no pesticides, no weed-killers, no cocktails of growth stimulants, no tweaking of nature. When I told Jean-Luc I had seen a shop in California – I think it was called a vegetable boutique – selling tomatoes that were square, for easier storage in the refrigerator, he was silent. His expression said everything that was necessary.

  He has been growing his own vegetables naturally for years, long before nature became fashionable. Enthusiastic articles about the return to the earth tend to irritate him. Serious gardeners, he says, never left the earth. But the revival of interest in organically grown food has made him something of a vegetable guru in France. He is the author of a most elegant little book about onions and garlic – the first food book I've seen that includes tips on how to repel vampire bats – and has just finished another on tomatoes. Now he finds himself being called in to create potagers for others. He will design your kitchen garden, stock it, and tell you how to make it flourish. If you ask him nicely, he might even come and eat some of it with you.

  His most celebrated client is Alain Ducasse, currently the most decorated chef in France with six Michelin stars. Ducasse has a restaurant in Paris (three stars), another in Monte Carlo (three stars), and more recently a third in Haute Provence, at Moustiers Sainte Marie. It was in Moustiers that Jean-Luc planned and planted a potager fit for a prince of gastronomy; not just a routine affair with rows of conventional peas, beans and lettuces, but a modern home for some ancient and almost forgotten vegetables.

  These he collects from all over the country. He has sometimes come across them growing wild in the fields, or struggling to survive among the weeds of someone else's long-abandoned kitchen garden. He has contacts among other gardeners, much older than himself, who give him seeds that are descended from seeds given to them by even older gardeners. He studies the classic books, like Vilmorin's Les Plantes potagères, published in 1890, which describes the vegetables our ancestors used to eat. In this way, he has rediscovered a distant, tender cousin of the parsnip, a whole range of aromatic herbs and an oddity that I think might have a great future.

  It has the instantly familiar form and surface texture of a tomato, but it's a black tomato. Or, depending on the light in which you see it, a deep purple tomato, not unlike the colour of an aubergine. The taste is delicate, perhaps slightly stronger than that of a red tomato, and the visual effect is dusky and dramatic. I can see it becoming wildly popular with chefs who have a weakness for large white plates and picturesque salads. With luck, it might even put the square tomato out of business.

  The last time I saw Jean-Luc, he was working on an exhibit for a gardening festival to be held in Chaumont. He had planned the perfect potager, and before starting the real thing he had laid out a scale model on a sheet of plywood, a miniature education in garden design.

  There would be 150 varieties of plants arranged in four squares: herbs, flowering vegetables, fruiting vegetables and root vegetables, each square contained within its own tight little border of low box bushes. The gravel paths dividing the squares made the form of a cross. In the centre, where the paths met, there would be a tree that Jean-Luc had found, the skeleton of an old olive that had frozen to death in the winter of 1956. And at the far end was the gloriette, a dignified version of the garden shed with a steep, pointed roof.

  The various elements were shown on the main model by even smaller models. Different-coloured tissue paper, in rows of microscopic tufts, indicated the different vegetables, with a layer of gravel specks for the paths, a spreading twig for the tree, everything to scale in a garden that was a testament to the Gallic passion for neatness, order and symmetry. Let a Frenchman loose in the great outdoors, and the first thing he'll want to do is organize it; then he will see if there are ways of eating it. The kitchen garden satisfies both requirements. A thing of beauty and a joy for dinner.

  I have to admit I would love a garden like that, and I asked Jean-Luc if he would consider designing one for us – something modest, nothing more than a large handkerchief of land whic
h we could turn into a home for black tomatoes and tender turnips.

  He said he'd be happy to think about it when he came back from New York. He and his wife were spending a week there; it would be their first time in America, and they had no idea what to expect. I had bought him a map of Manhattan, and while he looked at it I tried to think of parts of the city he might find particularly interesting.

  But where do you send a professional gardener on his first visit to New York? Central Park seemed like an obvious suggestion, and certainly its size – almost twice as big as the entire principality of Monaco – would impress Jean-Luc. But I wondered if his gardener's soul would be offended by the sprawl of it, the winding, random nature of its paths, the absence of straight lines, the undisciplined trees, the general lack of formality. And he'd have to be warned about the health hazards lurking in the park, from lethally indigestible hot dogs to muggers on rollerblades. But I thought he would like the way nature was contained along Park Avenue with its spring plantings of flowers and, just visible high above the traffic, the aerial groves of millionaires' roof gardens.

  As for vegetables, he would find that they were larger, glossier and more numerous than he was used to. Nothing would be out of season. And he would have his first exposure to the Korean greengrocers who seem to have taken over the vegetable business in Manhattan. Unfortunately, comparing notes with fellow professionals would be tricky, although I liked the thought of a Korean and a Provençal trying to discuss the fine points of courgettes without the benefit of a common language.

  In the end, I decided on just one suggestion. If Jean-Luc wanted to see some green – some serious green – being cultivated, the Stock Exchange was the place to go.

  He looked up from the map, shaking his head in astonishment, enchanted by the symmetrical grid of midtown Manhattan.