English Country Gardens

My dear horticulturally-inclined wife prevailed on me to accompany her on Sunday morning to a big garden show about an hour’s drive from here. It’s an annual event, rather like some of our flowers. (I’m still learning the difference between annual bloomers and hardy perennials, but don’t ask me to explain the difference unaided.)

This annual event takes place at somewhere called La Nouvelle Abbaye. Never having seen it written down before, I heard abaille (bee) rather than abbaye (abbey), so I had a very strange mental image of the place as a kind of geodesic dome built in the shape of a bee. Given the location – in the middle of fairly remote countryside – this now seems a fanciful misconception on my part.

It’s actually an old abbey. It was new some time around the Middle Ages and has been crumbling ever since. It finds itself, as The Daughter might have it, a few miles the other side of Gourdon, the sub-prefecture of the Lot. Some people like Gourdon, but I hate the place. It’s where the tax office is located, or the Hôtel des Impôts, as it’s known: an innocent enough name to lure in unsuspecting citizens who don’t know their rights. Twice I have been grilled there by battle-axes determined to catch me out and make me grovel. Twice I have had to pay supplementary tax following the ordeal on some specious grounds that I still don’t understand (though I suspect that it was to do with a tax on being foreign, topped up with a surtax on being English). So I shuddered on Sunday as I drove through Gourdon looking for the New Bee. 

It was just after 9 o’clock when we arrived, but the place was already heaving. Parking in a converted field and walking along the lane towards the abbey, it soon became apparent that most of the heaving was English. We were dangerously near Dordogneshire here – and it showed. Here an accent, there an accent, everywhere an accent…

Garden created without a single Spear & Jackson tool

The English do love to garden. There were signs for and references to jardins anglais everywhere. There were Brits with stalls and one even selling Spear & Jackson tools at a supposedly unbeatable price, which I suspected could have been beaten quite easily via the internet. One elderly couple pressed into my wife’s hand a flyer for their (presumably) magnificent garden – visits by arrangement only, price €10 including a cream tea. We smiled sweetly and kept their flyer for as long as it seemed proper and then dropped it into a rubbish sack.

The French have taken to their bosoms this notion of a nation of gardeners. I was talking to someone recently on my return from England. I explained that I had been away for a few days. ‘All those beautiful gardens,’ he or she suggested. I suppose there is an element of truth in it: you are rather more likely to spot a perfectly manicured lawn with immaculate herbaceous borders in England than you are in France.

The French are rather more pragmatic about their gardens. Apart from the lunatic fringe who create driveways lined with plaster animals leading to some improbable gateway, they tend to invest more time in their kitchen gardens. It’s fodder of course for la bouffe.

I’m not a great one for these events. It’s rather nice to wander among the exhibits, but I never know what to buy, particularly given the arid nature of our limestone soil. So my principal role is usually testing my wife with penetrating questions to ensure that she doesn’t go overboard. There was a fair bit of going overboard-ness, judging by the roaring trade that local girls seemed to be doing – offering a wheelbarrow service to your car.

Besides, I’ve always hated crowds. Humanity was beginning to seethe by 11 o’clock. So, after a quick chat with friends encountered at the refreshment tent, and having eavesdropped on an attempted conversation about pruning dead wood between an earnest English couple and an improbably patient French stallholder, we decided to take our purchases and flee.

Driving anywhere in France on Sunday is always a lottery, because the gendarmes are generally out in force – except, of course, between the hours of 12.00 and 14.00 (at the earliest) – so I was delighted to get through Gourdon and all the way back home without being pulled over.

Debs was as delighted with her haul as I generally am following a good music sale. We pottered away most of the afternoon in our country garden, which is neither really very French nor English, she with her plants and me with my Honda strimmer: the very model of a modern expat couple in springtime. A pair of quite hardy perennials, successfully transplanted from one location to another.