Villandry in winter

Villandry has been called ‘the finest potager in the world.’ For much of the year its beds are a mass of vegetables, from soft herbs and jewelled beetroot to blowsy purple cabbages and bright chubby pumpkins, all edged by long, low lines of trained apples and pears. It is a kitchen garden like no other, [...]

Read Full Post »

Tell-tale signs?

Signage. It sounds the most boring of topics. But in public parks and gardens, signs can make such a difference. Good ones make us feel welcome, confident, wanted. Bad ones leave us confused and irritated, sensing that our presence is merely tolerated. I’ve been noticing some examples in Parisian landscapes. First, some new signs in the [...]

Read Full Post »

Macro in a mason jar

Gardening Gone Wild is running one of its monthly photography competitions. The rules are here – but basically, as the name suggests, the competition encourages people to take close-up garden-related images using a glass mason jar, and thus to experiment with composition, background and light. Not having a garden or a mason jar, or indeed [...]

Read Full Post »

The monkey in my blog

From time to time, I get comments about my avatar (the icon attached to this blog). Most recently, fellow blogger Diana of Elephant’s Eye wondered if it was a startled Green Man. In fact, the little mask can be found in the glorious Villa d’Este, the sixteenth century “garden of marvels” in Tivoli, just outside [...]

Read Full Post »

Simple winter pleasures at musée Albert Kahn

A recent post praised the January drabness of two Paris gardens. It seemed to strike something of a chord, so today I offer another place where winter is at her unassuming best. The musée Albert Kahn is a trove of early films and photographs from around the world. Named after the wealthy French banker who [...]

Read Full Post »

Paris – then and now

A friend who sells vintage accessories has just sent me an old postcard of parc Monceau that she bought in the northeast of England. Postmarked 1905, it shows the rotunda designed by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux in the 1780s as a tollgate for a deeply unpopular customs duty. Now, as in 1905, the splendid neoclassical building sits [...]

Read Full Post »

Sex and death in the garden

Fashion dictates that gardens should offer year round interest. In particular, winter needs to be forced to play its part with evergreen shrubs, coloured bark, late-flowering perennials, quirkily-shaped stems, early bulbs. All must be colourful and bright and perky. But increasingly I am inclined towards gardens that reflect the reality of nature, in its disorder, [...]

Read Full Post »

Climate change à la Parisienne

Most people think about climate change with either skepticism or despair. In a new campaign, the mairie de Paris is trying to introduce a third response: optimism. A group of architects, collectif et alors, has imagined how Paris would respond to a rise in temperatures of 2 degrees. The results, presented as twenty postcards, show [...]

Read Full Post »