By Rebecca James

Early in May I enjoyed the fortunate experience of a week immersed within a beautiful French chateau and its magnificent and welcoming formal garden. This is a garden that invites the visitor to pause, take a breath, and appreciate nature’s beauty.

Chateau de la Carrière is located a 20 minute drive from Laval, in the Loire region, about two and half hours drive west of Paris, not too far from Rennes. It is nestled amongst farmland, with villages scattered quietly about, and without the tourists that dominate many parts of France. It is an area that reminds me of an extensive park of green fields, grazing cattle, and leafy woodlands. But the chateau contains the garden of my dreams. The Australian owner of the chateau, initially restored the building and grounds and laid out the origins of the formal garden with a French designer. She then invited Paul Bangay to further develop the expansive grounds, including a large 200 year old protected stonewalled area.

The garden combines formal French borders, including a pleached hornbeam hedge, meandering beds and flowering perennials and the potager, which produces a feast of fruit, flowers and vegetables for the chateau chefs. I will never forget my walks in the garden, the sense of calm, the seasonal abundance of produce, and the view looking across the garden in the early morning, over the stone fence and through the orchard, across the misty fields and grazing cattle, to distant hilltop homes. Beautiful and serene.

When I was there, the garden was shaking off its winter coat, the warm spring greens livening up the winter hues, and I was struck by the abundance of peonies, poking boldly through the foliage and striking their red coats against the edible greens, iris, and spring bulbs. It is a garden of rows and order, but with a cheeky nod to the abundance of natures way of seeding itself casually and precociously. Who cares if there are peonies amongst the rhubarb! Gardeners were busy in thehothouse, potting up seedlings, and then digging, mulching and fertilising the garden beds to prepare for spring and summer.

This wonderful chateau garden offers an amazing contrast with the size of our individual plots at Ashburton. But if we consider our garden as a whole, with its variety of plantings, the love, care and attention of plot holder members, and the amazing variety of vegetables we grow, I think we can be rightly proud of what we can achieve together!

You can find out more about the chateau at:

www.ourfrenchcountrychateau.com

And the garden at

https://paulbangay.com/project/chateau-de-la-carriere-france

A magical garden experience in France

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