Our final day of gardens in France was the busiest and best. The weather decided it was finally summer and the visits were amazing.
In the morning we went to Chaumont, the home of the International Garden Festival.
Open from March to November, the festival comprises 30 show gardens set in the beautiful grounds of the Chateaux. The emphasis is very much on concept and cutting edge design, with gardens pushing the boundaries. The interesting thing is that the gardens have to look fabulous for 6 months, unlike Chelsea when everything is aimed at the 5 day peak, with plants forced on and held back to hit maximum impact.
The gardens were very varied, some more successful than others and some plain strange!
The theme set was Plant Collectors.
The carnivorous plant garden, with the dangerous plants caged and no feeding allowed, approached the theme with a level of humour and fun.
My personal favourite was the 'Nuances' garden, which had the garden as art on the wall with a bench in a courtyard to sit and view it from.
The planting was built up to create a frame full of texture and restrained silver, blue and purple planting.
I love the idea that later in the season it might break out of the frame, spilling out into the plainness of the courtyard.
The Black Garden, full of dark planting with flashes of gold was planted around a central plinth with gold and black jewellery on it (probably the weakest part of the garden in my opinion). This was one of the gardens that felt very new - it will improve with age and some time to grow.
'Suspensions Climatiques' is a more literal collectors garden made up of shelves of plants in bottles, jars and boxes as if just collected. Some of the collection escapes to take over, like the gorgeous Clematis above.
But some of the collection was tiny and constrained in bottles so needed looking closely at.
'Le Jardin des Grains' concentrated on the seed collectors. Each plant grew from a collection of it's own seeds, and structure was added by sculptures made from garden sieves. It was interesting to see some of the biggest seeds growing into small and delicate plants and somme of the smallest seeds creating trees!
'Fleur Bleue' was very simple - a mound of pots containing a collection of blue flowered plants. Definitely something manageable for the domestic garden.
'Le Jardin du Teinturier' or The Dyers Garden was full of plants used for colouring textiles. There was lots of information about the plants but all in French (not surprisingly!) so my understanding was limited. However there was the most stunning wall made out of palettes and Kilner jars full of coloured liquid. I would love something like this - when the sun shone through it it was magical!
There was a garden all about clover with pressed 'lucky' 4 leaf clover in frames
My other favourite was a gallery style garden, with a slightly overgrown and scrubby garden with some images of a beautiful garden on a far wall. Except that as we looked it became clear that they were not images but angled mirrors and the beautiful garden was in front of us but out of sight! How clever is that - I love that twist.
The contrast between the visible garden and the invisible garden was amazing.
Gardens as art!
And then there was the gorgeous planting in-between the show gardens!
What a morning - inspiration overload, I can't believe we did all that before lunch!
There were so many things to see, to attempt to copy and admire.
Trend wise there seemed to be quite a number of carnivorous plants and lots of blue planting which means that I am bang on trend at the moment as my blue bed is in full bloom! I'm not so good on the carnivorous plants though.
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