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 are grand potagers like Villandry and La
Prieure D'Orsan and allotments and back gardens spotted on the way.
Monty 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.
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