- 1 hour ago
Travels across France in search of the country's most venerated gardens. The segment focuses on the relationship and intersections between gardens and art. Don visits the gardens of two of France's most famous artists - Paul Cézanne and Claude Monet - to explore how their landscapes influenced their work and also tours more contemporary gardens that fuse together artistic aesthetics with the natural and doctored landscapes.
探访莫奈的吉维尼花园等由艺术家打造的花园,各种花园特别接地气, 探索他们的风景如何影响他们的作品, 并参观将艺术美学与自然和篡改的风景融为一体的更现代的花园.
探访莫奈的吉维尼花园等由艺术家打造的花园,各种花园特别接地气, 探索他们的风景如何影响他们的作品, 并参观将艺术美学与自然和篡改的风景融为一体的更现代的花园.
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TVTranscript
00:02What images does France conjure up for you?
00:05Now, for me, there are beautiful houses and gardens of all kinds,
00:10but also glorious markets, street cafes,
00:14and some very formative experiences.
00:18When I was 19, I came to the south of France
00:20and lived in Aix-en-Provence for six months.
00:23And ever since then, I've loved France and everything to do with it.
00:27And I want to share that passion for the country with you
00:30through its gardens.
00:33I'll be travelling the byways of the French countryside.
00:37This is what Hedershawa was known for.
00:40Meeting local gardeners...
00:45..tasting the very best of their harvest.
00:48Sometimes this job is really good.
00:52Getting to turn on huge fountains...
00:54I can hear the water.
00:57..and trying to find out what makes French gardens,
01:00and indeed the French, unique.
01:02Today, I shall be looking both at the gardens of artists
01:05and gardens that are works of art in their own right.
01:10I'll be visiting gardens portrayed by painters
01:13like Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne,
01:15as well as the work of France's most interesting contemporary designers.
01:20And I'll be trying to find out at what point the French think
01:24that a garden transcends horticulture and becomes a work of art.
01:47This is Café Nemours, in the heart of Paris, just round the corner from the Louvre.
01:59Paris has always attracted artists and intellectuals.
02:06I remember my grandfather, who died 30 years ago when he was nearly 100,
02:12telling me how that he came and lived and worked in Paris in 1901.
02:17And that it was a very sexy, free city, where they did the Can-Can,
02:22and there was the Moulin Rouge.
02:24Paris was somewhere that was sophisticated,
02:26where art was respected and was very creative.
02:30So, just to come and sit and watch street life go by
02:35was more exciting than anything else you could get in Britain.
02:40It still is.
02:45That sense of creative freedom
02:47can perhaps be dated back to the exhibition at the Louvre in 1863,
02:52which included for the first time
02:54the early work of a radical group of artists,
02:57now known as the Impressionists.
03:00Painting directly from nature,
03:02painters like Paul Cezanne and Claude Monet
03:04embraced light and colour as their central themes,
03:09attempting to capture the essence of a single moment in their canvases.
03:13And gardens, nature at its most domestic and accessible,
03:18were to be a common subject of their paintings.
03:22A series of the most famous of all Impressionist paintings
03:25are displayed here, in the Orangerie,
03:28in the Tuileries Gardens.
03:36They are the Eight Nymphes,
03:39Monet's canvases of water lilies,
03:42inspired by the water garden he created
03:44and then painted again and again.
03:53of course, the really overwhelming thing is the scale.
04:00These are simply enormous paintings.
04:05They're bigger than most poms.
04:07The scale is celestial.
04:13What's really interesting is that these have become almost completely abstract.
04:19It's as though Monet has immersed himself so closely and nearly with what he's painting.
04:25I see him standing right close to the canvas.
04:30He's not really painting the garden anymore.
04:33He's painting what the garden means.
04:36He's painting light and colour and the fact that it's water.
04:41It's bouncing off and it's becoming abstract and metaphysical.
04:46And that's beautiful.
04:49That's inspiring.
04:52But he's taken the garden and gone beyond.
04:58To find out more about Monet's paintings,
05:00I want to go to the source of his inspiration.
05:03So I'm leaving that and going west to visit his garden in Normandy
05:07that he made in a small village on the banks of the Seine.
05:17This is Givigny, the garden of Claude Monet,
05:20and it's a garden I know.
05:21I've been here twice before, but never before in April.
05:33Monet found this old cider farm in the village of Givigny in the spring of 1883
05:39when he was looking for a home to rent for his young and growing family.
05:44At the age of 43, he was already an experienced gardener
05:47and was to spend the remaining 43 years of his life obsessed by this garden.
05:55As soon as he moved in,
05:57he set to work transforming the orchard in front of the farmhouse.
06:01The first thing that strikes me is how fresh everything is.
06:05When I came here the first time, it was high summer,
06:08and actually it was surprisingly, not drab, that's the wrong word,
06:11but it was overwhelmed with foliage and in-between colour phases.
06:19And then when I came here in late spring, the colour was incredibly intense,
06:23but now there is a lightness
06:26and almost the colours dance above the borders.
06:30It's lovely.
06:33Monet laid the garden out in blocks of colour like an artist's palette,
06:38mixing simple flowers like daisies and poppies
06:41with more unusual varieties like the species tulips.
06:44In fact, he grew increasingly particular about the exact varieties
06:48that would give him the texture and colour he wanted to paint.
06:52And once said,
06:53I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
06:59In the process of making the garden, he transformed the site.
07:03But he didn't always get his own way.
07:07This central alley was flanked when he came here with trees.
07:11There were fir trees, new trees.
07:12Now he cut some down and put up these arches on the site of where the trees were.
07:18But his wife Alice wouldn't let him cut down the fir trees that were there.
07:22Although they were clearly pretty horrid and inappropriate.
07:25So he kept them, but then he obviously worked on her for a bit
07:29because he was allowed to cut all off except for the trunks,
07:33which looked really odd.
07:34They looked like fat telegraph poles and he grew roses up them.
07:38But then, when she died,
07:42with a sort of due period of mourning for tree and wife,
07:45he came out and he cut them down.
07:53Monet began painting this part of the garden, which is called the Clos Normand,
07:56as soon as he moved in and continued to do so for the rest of his life.
08:01He kept a strict daily routine,
08:03rising at dawn and going outside to catch the light.
08:07And unlike the hordes of tourists,
08:09all trying to snap the whole essence of the garden in one killer shot,
08:13this meant that he often worked systematically
08:16on a number of canvases simultaneously,
08:19moving from one to the other around the garden as the light changed.
08:26To maintain the right intensity of colour,
08:29he thought nothing of ripping out hundreds of flowers
08:31and replacing them almost daily,
08:33which is how the garden is still run.
08:36James Priest is the English head gardener
08:39whose job it is to maintain Monet's legacy.
08:42One of the things I'm interested in is the relationship
08:45between artists and gardens.
08:49What do you think about that?
08:51I think it's a very good parallel.
08:53It's that the artist is working on this on canvas,
08:57but we're working both with a picture to make
08:59and our tools of plants, whereas the artist is using paints,
09:03but we're making something according to what theme.
09:07And artists have different movements, gardeners have different styles.
09:11So we decide on the style we want,
09:13and we're trying to make something the most beautiful, harmonious,
09:17and the true to a feeling.
09:19Because an artist doesn't, an artist to my mind,
09:23doesn't just make something that's real and cold.
09:26He makes something that has depth to it and feeling and emotion to it.
09:29So I think the parallel is very, very close.
09:31Monet had to know his colours and how to mix them and how to use them.
09:34I have to know my flowers and the colours, how to use them.
09:37So technically two different techniques,
09:39but the final result is very comparable.
09:43Do you think Monet was a good gardener or not?
09:46I think that at the end of his life he was a good gardener.
09:49I think at the beginning of his life, like all of us,
09:50he had to learn what gardening was about,
09:52and so he started very simply.
09:54But it took time.
09:55It took time, it took all his life, yes.
09:59Today, over 600,000 people a year
10:03come to appreciate Monet the gardener.
10:06Ten years after he first moved to Givigny,
10:09Monet sold enough paintings to enable him
10:11not only to buy the house and clone Normand,
10:13but also a plot of land over the road
10:16and begin to make his famous water garden.
10:23The water lilies are not yet in flower,
10:26so I shall make a return visit to see them later in the summer.
10:32I'm now going south on the TGV to visit a very different garden,
10:37which was also the inspiration for a painter that I love.
10:41He was a contemporary and friend of Monet's called Paul Cezanne.
10:44This means retracing the steps of my much younger self.
10:47But back then, the journey from Paris to Marseille took all night,
10:51and now it's a mere three hours.
10:54The last time I made this journey by train was 1974.
10:57I was 19 and looking for light, really.
11:02I'd become entranced by the paintings of Paul Cezanne
11:05and the way that he used light and landscape.
11:08And I was completely besotted by this idea of this bright, strong light
11:14filtered through landscape.
11:17By then I was gardening a lot,
11:19and I felt a sort of deep emotional attraction
11:21to growth and soil and landscape,
11:25and I painted a little bit.
11:26And to see it all come together was thrilling.
11:31So down I came, and it was a big adventure.
11:35I still have my journal from those days,
11:37and it records the excitement and wonder I felt
11:41on my first visit into the light of the sun.
11:44Sunday the 13th of October, 1974,
11:47I woke at seven to find myself in broad Provencal sunshine
11:50with a train at Isle.
11:51I spent the rest of the journey gazing at Provence,
11:54misty blue mountains, blue sparkling sea,
11:56white gleaming rock, olive trees, cypress firs.
11:59So beautiful.
12:01Here's me at 19, proudly showing my new berry.
12:05I'd obviously just bought that.
12:15I'd change trains and travel on to Aix-en-Provence.
12:19When I get there, I go straight back to visit some old haunts.
12:24This is Rue Portaliste, where I lived when I was in Aix.
12:28And it was there, number 20.
12:32And I was up on the second floor.
12:38The market is still here at the square at the end of the street.
12:41I'd come here and scavenged the leftovers,
12:44which were nicer than anything I could get in Britain.
12:48This is a mobilette.
12:49I had one similar to it, not actually quite so good,
12:52because this is a Solex where the engine was in front.
12:54Mine was underneath.
12:56But this curious hybrid of bicycle and motorbike
13:00that were really common 30, 40 years ago,
13:02hardly ever seen them now.
13:04But I was set off, bravely, tearing along at 20 miles an hour.
13:09And if things got a bit dodgy when you run out of fuel,
13:11you could pedal.
13:17The main reason I was here was to get closer to the paintings that so inspired me.
13:24Paul Cezanne was born in Aix in 1839, and he lived here most of his life.
13:28He painted the area ceaselessly,
13:31distilling the essence of the landscape and the southern light onto canvas.
13:37Cezanne lived in his parental home, the Jeanne de Bouffin,
13:40and painted the garden in every season.
13:43Back in the 1970s, I thought that if I went to see the garden,
13:47it would teach me something about Cezanne's paintings.
13:50But it didn't prove to be that easy.
13:52I wanted to find a Jeanne de Bouffin,
13:55which I knew was where Cezanne was brought up
13:59and where he lived most of his life, actually.
14:01And I thought maybe that I could go in and walk around,
14:03but anyway, it was no use because the gates were firmly locked,
14:06and it seemed to be very closed down.
14:08It was scruffy, there didn't seem to be any signs of life,
14:11no one going in or out,
14:12so I hung around for a bit and went away again.
14:16Anyway, I now know that I can go in nearly 40 years later
14:21and at last have a look around.
14:35The garden is very simple.
14:38It isn't filled with flowers like Givigny,
14:41but Cezanne loved to paint the lines of the trees
14:45and the light and the shade filtering through the branches.
14:50And all the features that are so recognisable from his paintings
14:54are still here.
14:55The plain trees.
14:59The pool.
15:02And the rather grand house itself.
15:05In fact, it seems almost untouched since he lived here.
15:13I've got some postcards of Jeanne de Bouffin.
15:17I want to match them up and see.
15:19I mean, it is a very imposing house.
15:23See, that sort of thing.
15:26If you look, there's the house.
15:28That's good.
15:30Actually, looking at that, I've got another postcard.
15:34See, look at that.
15:36That postcard there is that.
15:41And there's the pond, look.
15:43There's the pond, the corner of the pond, which is there.
15:47There's the path, much narrower, and there are the avenue.
15:50Exactly there.
15:51So he's standing here and painting that.
15:55And in fact, even, even that little bit there is this here.
16:01It's that.
16:03That's good.
16:06You see, what's exciting about that is that it's not just identifying it.
16:11For me, a garden is home, is life, is childhood, memory, dreams, all bound up.
16:18You can't separate it.
16:19So where Cézanne walked in the garden, let alone where he painted in the garden,
16:24connects you to him in a way, means you smell the same smells.
16:28You hear the same things.
16:30He would have heard the water trickling.
16:32And I think that's just thrilling.
16:34I think that's really living, breathing history in a way that just a postcard can't do.
16:49When Cézanne was 60, his mother died and the house and garden had to be sold.
16:56Cézanne built himself a small studio and garden a couple of miles away on the other side of X.
17:09It is very lovely.
17:12It's one's idea of a villa in the middle of a hot day.
17:18And he built it to live in.
17:19But he never did.
17:20He then transformed it into a studio, but came up here to work every day.
17:26And he made a garden from what was farmland.
17:30And actually, the garden is not much to look at now, and apparently it never was.
17:33The garden wasn't important to him in a horticultural sense.
17:36But what he loved, and painted a lot, were the lines and shapes of stems and branches and light and
17:44colour filtering through.
17:47So it mattered to him.
17:49And also having that sort of safety zone around him.
17:53This was absolutely his space, and clearly fired his creativity.
17:59Now it's sort of been let go, and it's interesting.
18:02If this was England and this was National Trust, it would be fully restored to exactly the date when Cézanne
18:07made it.
18:08But I like the way that it's just become itself, and rather suspect that Cézanne would have liked it too.
18:19The garden may have been allowed to grow wild, but the studio is beautifully preserved.
18:26And it does feel as though Cézanne has just walked out of the room.
18:42It's a letter to Monet, dated 6th of July, 1895.
18:53It's been said of Cézanne that he painted still lives like landscape, and landscape like still lives.
19:00And yet he was one of the first people to paint still lives as though he'd just caught them.
19:05As though he'd just got their essence before it drifted away.
19:09And that has a spiritual quality, and it's incredibly beautiful.
19:13And in a way, it's not fanciful to compare that to gardening.
19:16It's that when you're making a garden, or even just enjoying a garden,
19:19there is that profound sense of just being in the moment, and you share it.
19:24And you know it's going to change, the weather will change, the plant will move on,
19:28and it'll never be the same again.
19:30But just, just for a second, you were precisely there.
19:36And that's what Cézanne's painting immediately gave me, and I've given lots of other people.
19:49I may have had to wait 40 years to come and see his home and gardens, but it's certainly increased
19:55my understanding of Cézanne's work.
20:01By coming and walking through his garden, and looking at it, and letting the light fall, and just sitting in
20:07it quietly,
20:09I've realised something very profoundly that I hadn't quite got from looking at the pictures,
20:14which is that it's ordinary.
20:16It's just like lots of other people's gardens, bigger than most, but the contents are the same.
20:22Nothing special here at all.
20:24And what, of course, Cézanne did was take those ordinary elements and utterly transform them.
20:31Through genius, he made the private and the domestic, the back garden,
20:37into something that everybody in the world realises as truly great art.
20:49Cézanne didn't need to create a garden for it to inspire his art.
20:53But the next garden I want to show you was self-consciously made as a work of art in itself.
21:02To get there, I am reunited with my favourite French car,
21:06but I can't resist visiting a scene that Cézanne painted many times.
21:11I'm driving a 2CV.
21:15On a twisty windy Provencal road.
21:20On the wrong side of the road is slightly...
21:23Here we go.
21:27When I was here as a teenager, I worked in a garden just outside Aix.
21:31I loved the journey there because the road took me past the spot where Cézanne repeatedly set up his easel
21:37to paint the great outcrop of Mont-Saint-Victoire.
21:42Oh, look, you see, there's Mont-Saint-Victoire.
21:46Incredible view.
21:48You see, that still thrills me. What are we now? All this time, I've seen it lots of times, and
21:52it's still thrilling.
21:53You can imagine what it was like as a 19-year-old.
21:57It's as exciting now as it was then.
21:59So every time I saw it, I was in the painting. I was here, in the place where the painting
22:05was.
22:07And that was such a buzz.
22:11Cézanne painted Mont-Saint-Victoire over 80 times.
22:14And through his paintings, one can chart his move towards abstraction.
22:19By the time he died in 1906, he was increasingly using blocks of colour to build semi-abstract forms.
22:26This later work of Cézanne helped inspire a radical new art movement, cubism.
22:34I've come 65 miles to the Riviera town of Ierre to see the world's first cubist garden.
22:43I couldn't get any breakfast at the hotel, and although it's great being able to get in early and see
22:48the garden,
22:49I've got to have some coffee before I start. I can't think.
22:56The central idea of cubism is to show a subject from several perspectives at the same time.
23:03And it revolutionises the world architecture.
23:13The garden I'm heading off to see it this time of day is called Villa Noailles.
23:18And it was made in the 1920s as the first truly modern garden in France, because it's a cubist garden.
23:27And was deliberately made, really, as a continuation of the paintings that the cubists did and the sculptures.
23:35So it's part garden, part work of art.
23:37And what I don't know is if it's still maintained as it was, if it's retained that sense of sort
23:46of shocking new experimental art.
23:49But I'll find out when I've had a cup of coffee.
23:56I'll find out when I've had a cup of coffee.
23:59I'll find out when I've had a cup of coffee.
24:00In 1927, Charles and Marie-Louis de Noailles, aristocratic and hugely wealthy patrons of modern art, decided to build a
24:08holiday villa, complete with a cubist garden.
24:14What was unusual, even groundbreaking, was that they commissioned the designer, Gabriel Gavreckian, to make the garden expressly as a
24:24work of art.
24:29I was quite worried before coming to see this, because although I'd seen lots of pictures, it looked a bit
24:34scruffy.
24:35And I couldn't quite see how that it would work as a garden.
24:41But it does, and it's a relief, because it's all sorts of things.
24:45It's charming, it's a piece of history, and it's definitely a piece of art.
24:53It was originally planted with tulips and standard citrus.
24:57But from the outset, the plants were always secondary to the planes and shapes of Gavreckian's design.
25:04It's as though he's taken recognisable elements of the garden, like a gravel path,
25:08and reassembled them in different dimensions to create his work.
25:15It's very nice once you're inside it.
25:16It's very different, actually, because all the different levels are really working.
25:25And although there are no paths, it actually feels reasonable to go.
25:29You feel like a chess piece on a chess board.
25:32My move.
25:37And it's a very friendly space, I suppose, which is not a word you would associate, really, with cubism.
25:45But it works.
25:49I like the way of cubism, that although there are no paths, the paths that there are, the gravel, is
25:55just an angle at the wall.
25:56So your eye is saying path, and yet it's not doing it.
25:59It's all part of that cubist mentality of trying to unpick the world and put it back together again in
26:06a jumble that makes you see it with fresh eyes.
26:09This makes you see a garden with fresh eyes.
26:13When it was made 85 years ago, this garden was revolutionary and challenged all perceptions of what a garden was
26:21or might be.
26:25The Denois kept open house for artists and intellectuals, making Villanois, for a while, the most fashionable artistic centre in
26:32the whole of France.
26:34Pierre Quillet's grandfather was the butler here during that period.
26:39The style of life.
26:42Many visitors.
26:44A lot.
26:46And then a lot of animation.
26:48So it gave a lot of fun in life.
26:51And artists.
26:53A lot.
26:54A lot of artists.
26:55Even at the end it became very difficult for a young artist at the time to not go through the
27:01Noai to be able to succeed.
27:02The most famous is Dali.
27:04Dali.
27:05Lanced by Charles and I.
27:08At the time my mother told me that he had nothing to eat.
27:13So he came to eat in the kitchen to eat a little bit.
27:19If the planting hasn't stood the test of time, the structure of the garden certainly has.
27:24And it's still provocative and interesting.
27:3360 miles north of the air is another garden which has been bought and sold as a collector's item.
27:40Its every detail was created in direct artistic response to the landscape that surrounds it.
27:47But there's something I want to see on the way.
27:50I'm just going to make a little detour because I've heard that there's a lavender field down here.
27:55And I want to see lavender growing in its natural habitat, so to speak.
28:08Look at that.
28:18The thing about lavender grown here is that it's got exactly the conditions it wants.
28:24So you've got this very dry limestone.
28:28Look at that, it's just powder in my hands.
28:30And look how healthy that is.
28:33It's just completely found where it wants to be.
28:37And when I do that, I'm surprised you can't see the air shimmer with scent.
28:42It's so rich and oily.
28:44I'm going quite heavy, it's almost intoxicating.
28:47And what lavender loves is harsh extreme conditions and really good drainage.
28:55But it's surprising that the cherries, I mean cherries which we think of as Garden of England cherries, but they
29:02love it here.
29:04It just shows you what they really like.
29:09Mmm.
29:12Not quite ripe, but lovely.
29:15That one looks better.
29:23Standing in a provincial sunshine, next to a lavender field, eating cherries.
29:28That's quite good.
29:31That's quite good.
30:01That's quite good.
30:01It's up there somewhere.
30:03I'll find it.
30:06It's in the village of Bonnier, in the heart of the Louvre in Provence.
30:12I'm coming here to see it as a work of art.
30:15But it has also set the standard as the dream Provencal garden.
30:28Good morning.
30:30Bonjour.
30:30Bonjour.
30:52The garden is modest in size and set on a steep slope in the middle of the village.
30:57It was made by Nicole de Vézier, a successful textile designer, using a style that is deceptively simple, based around
31:06native plants and natural materials.
31:15I love the way that this garden picks up the rhythm of the place.
31:20It does it in a number of ways.
31:21The obvious one are in the outlines and the shapes that follow the landscape.
31:26And that's very subtle.
31:28It shows that Nicole really looked and really observed.
31:33And didn't copy, but just picked up on that flow and let it run through the garden.
31:43Nicole didn't base her garden on any rare or unusual plants.
31:47These cypresses are native to the region, and lavender, of course, loves it here.
31:54It's not what she used, but how she used it, the artistry she employed, that makes La Louvre so special.
32:03At every turn, there is a perfectly composed still life.
32:13Despite the very awkward sight, La Louvre works both as a lovely garden and as a work of art.
32:20And whilst it seems deceptively simple, it is in fact edited in every detail.
32:27This garden is a really good example on how to make a small space seem bigger.
32:34And it does it by two ways.
32:36One is by filling it, and the other is by compressing space.
32:40And the easiest way to do that is by having your walkways and your entrances and exits really narrow.
32:47And by compressing them down so that you have to sort of squidge through almost and brush against the foliage,
32:53which is lovely because there's really good sense.
32:56It pushes space in, and then as you come out the other side, it releases it and makes it seem
33:01much bigger.
33:03And you'd be surprised at how that works every time.
33:09At the age of 80, ten years after starting La Louvre, Nicole decided to sell her garden because she wanted
33:15to make a new one.
33:16The art collector Judith Pillsbury was the buyer, and she purchased it as a finished work of art.
33:24It was just a coup de foudre. It was just so beautiful. It was like being able to buy Sissinghurst.
33:30When one is buying into, literally and figuratively, into a garden that's very established, are you obliged to curate it?
33:41Well, I think one is obliged to curate it. I mean, that's what I feel.
33:44And I'm an art dealer, so I'm used to taking care of works of art.
33:48The idea of the artists creating their art through the medium of porticulture is one that interests me a lot.
33:57Do you think that it's practical that one can do that?
34:01I don't know that Nicole started out that way.
34:05I think that she was someone who just couldn't stop creating, and she had a vision of Provence, which at
34:13that time was very new.
34:15I mean, she embraced, you know, the vernacular of a peasant garden, hardscrabble, not very many plants.
34:23She embraced that, and she turned that into something that was a positive.
34:33Nicole Vézien died 20 years ago, but her style of Provencal garden has become increasingly influential.
34:42Although she made a world-famous garden, the irony is that Nicole Vézien was conventionally no gardener.
34:48She didn't dig the garden at all.
34:52There was no attempt to return fertility. She never made compost.
34:56She planted much too close together.
34:59But she had an absolutely innate feel for two things.
35:03One was colour, and the other was form.
35:05And the colours she's used here are very muted and faded, and they look terrific under a very bright sun.
35:12They have a kind of richness and subtle intensity.
35:16Whereas if you use them under grey skies, that just looks drab.
35:19And the other thing that she just had a superb feel for was space.
35:24It's a sculptural quality.
35:25And her clipping and training, it wasn't just to do with organising the plants themselves, but the space between plants.
35:33The space between branches that catches light and the distant horizon is just exquisite.
35:41And that's gardening of real high quality.
35:44She may not have known how to grow the plants or even their names, but she sure knew how to
35:49make them look good.
35:55I left here wondering whether you can make a garden, or indeed a work of art, by accident.
36:02Can one drift into the other, or must you set out with a clear purpose and vision?
36:17To try and answer this, I've decided to look to the present and ask three of France's contemporary designers what
36:24they think the relationship is between their gardens and art.
36:34One uses his plants as living sculpture.
36:38Another takes the elements of the traditional French formal garden and reinvents them to elegant effect.
36:44And the third creates gardens that climb vertically on the walls of inner city buildings.
36:52This one is on the Quai Branly in Paris.
36:56But Patrick Blanc's work is now found all over the world, commissioned and displayed like paintings, neatly bridging the gap
37:08between gardens and art.
37:11I've come to see Patrick at his seemingly ordinary home in the south of Paris.
37:21Hello, Patrick. Hello.
37:24Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.
37:26But inside, it's anything but ordinary.
37:32Ah, so I can see.
37:34Yes.
37:35This is the end.
37:37My goodness.
37:38Yes.
37:39Yes.
37:39It's a kind of a tropical forest at home.
37:43Because Patrick has his own indoor vertical garden.
37:47Oh, now it's a little bit more than three years old.
37:52Or, as he calls it, a mur vegetat, a wall of plants.
37:58Three years old?
37:59Yes.
38:00Yes, yes, yes.
38:01And each plant has its own place because there are about 250 species.
38:08250 species here?
38:10Yes.
38:12Despite his growing fame as an artistic gardener, Patrick is first and foremost an academic botanist, with an obsession for
38:20plants from tropical rainforests.
38:22And as rainforests account for over half the plant species on the planet, they're a rich source of material for
38:28his living world.
38:30Tell me, I mean, just technically, how do you fix them in? What are they growing in?
38:35There are two sheets of felt, you see?
38:36Yeah.
38:37Two sheets. I open and I put the plants just between the felt and the roots are growing in the
38:41felt in the same way as they're growing among mosses covering the rocks in rainforests.
38:45So they don't need any nutrients?
38:47No. When you have, for instance, limestone cliffs you have everywhere in Europe, and you see many species are growing
38:53as soon as there is some circulation of water.
38:57The only important thing is to choose the species which in nature are always growing on vertical or very oblique
39:05surfaces.
39:07And how do you keep it watered?
39:09Oh, it's very easy. At the top you have a hose with some holes.
39:14So the water, you have a hose and it drips down?
39:16Yes.
39:17Inside this perfectly ordinary Parisian home, Patrick has created his own miniature ecosystem, complete with lizards, birds, and even an
39:30underfloor aquarium.
39:33Yet, although this is quite unlike most gardens, the plants are still adapting and growing where it most suits them.
39:43In the case of a vertical garden, you see, the plant can escape much more. You see, this ficus, ficus
39:51villosa, for instance, which is here.
39:53I did plant it here. I didn't know it wanted to climb. But now it is at the top and
40:00I think maybe it will be covering the ceiling.
40:05So, you see, there are, with vertical gardens, there are many more surprises because plants are totally free.
40:11Is this, do you think? I mean, other people have called this a work of art. Do you think of
40:15it as your artwork? Or do you think of it as your garden? Or both?
40:21For me, it's my babies.
40:24Your babies.
40:25Yes.
40:29I like the exuberance of Patrick's living walls. This one is also in Paris, and in the Rue de la
40:35Vacherie, and they've been much imitated around the world.
40:41Now, Patrick himself is clearly not concerned whether they're art or not, but they challenge the nature of a garden.
40:48And a lot of people enjoy them as living art.
40:56I'm now leaving Paris to head north, and the next gardener I'm going to meet has taken on a deeply
41:02serious subject, war and peace.
41:06His garden has been inspired by the countryside that it is setting, and its long and troubled history.
41:13This landscape of northern France can feel very familiar to the British eyes.
41:18And it does look similar in many ways, but the really big difference is that in this landscape, war raged
41:26within living memory, and was the scene of horrendous fighting and terrible losses.
41:32And the marks of that are still here, both physically, on the landscape itself, and in the community.
41:47The name of the garden that I'm heading towards is Cerricor, near the town of Arras.
41:56Cerricor is the creation of Yves Gosse de Gaulle.
41:59He was born and brought up here, and identifies personally with the history of the surrounding battle-scarred landscape.
42:08This is what inspired him to create this large garden from scratch.
42:18The 11-acre garden is divided into many compartments, with the warrior garden at its heart.
42:26This is the Jardin Guerrier, warrior garden, with soldiers here.
42:34These are soldiers.
42:35Yes.
42:38Ranks of fastidiate Irish yews, each trimmed to an individual height, stand at the ready.
42:46Just beyond them, are crude faces clipped from Cyprus.
42:51Ah, there!
42:53What are they?
42:55Des visages?
42:57Des visages.
42:58We call them the warrior masks.
43:02Warrior masks.
43:02Yes, yes, yes.
43:05Eve loves the symbolism of plants.
43:07But the garden always has direct images of the brutality that raged in this region just a few generations ago.
43:14What are the holes?
43:16Here are the holes of bombs, craters.
43:18Oh, the holes of bombs.
43:19The craters.
43:20These are not the real holes of bombs?
43:22No, these are not the real holes of bombs.
43:23We wanted to mark a little bit, if you want, the ground, to show that it was a martyr land.
43:30Yes.
43:30There were a lot of passages, a lot of invasions.
43:35We are not very far from the Djincourt.
43:37The two world wars also happened here.
43:40So it's a land that really suffered a lot.
43:44And it was a way to explain it.
43:48I never thought I'd say this, that a hole could be a beautiful thing.
43:52It's a bit special to make trees in the garden, like that.
43:56No, no, no.
43:56It's special, it's different, but it's interesting.
44:01It's interesting.
44:03It's interesting.
44:04It's interesting.
44:05It's interesting.
44:06Everything in this garden has a story or a symbol attached to it.
44:14And this place, it's an infinity, which symbolizes the fact that war does not lead to anything.
44:24It's always an impasse.
44:27So there is a little bit of light in the bottom, which symbolizes hope.
44:32If we move well, we have light.
44:35Ah, yes.
44:35A little bit of light.
44:36A little bit of light.
44:38Yes, yes, yes.
44:39When you started this garden, did you try to do art or the garden?
44:46I tried to do three things at the same time.
44:49I started with a collection of plants.
44:51And then I tried to create something with these plants.
44:56To do art.
44:57And then to tell a story at the same time.
45:00I wanted to talk about the plants.
45:02I wanted to tell a story through my garden.
45:10Even though Yves started as a plantsman, he is, in a very French way, in love with the intellectual concepts
45:19that plants can express.
45:21But the garden's idiosyncrasies make it both very personal and yet accessible at every level.
45:29This is a big garden and it's full of ideas.
45:33And every corner you turn, there's something else going on.
45:35And what you feel like, it's a party, the door opens, and as a visitor, welcome it.
45:40Come and join it.
45:41And it's full of jostling, friendly humanity.
45:45And that's pretty good for a garden.
45:47Not many gardens achieve that.
45:49But I think what doesn't work is there's no discrimination.
45:53And I think art has to leave out more than it includes.
45:59And you get a feeling here is nothing has been left out.
46:05The last of these modern gardens is in Normandy, a couple of hours' drive away.
46:09And here, all that I've learnt about the French comes together in what I consider a hugely successful artistic work
46:17and a lovely garden.
46:29This is Le Jardin Plume, the feather garden, made over the past 15 years.
46:39I first came here in winter, and it was a bleak and bare but dramatic.
46:44And you could see what was going on, but you had to guess quite a lot.
46:48But now it's all evident and visible, and I guess at its absolute best.
46:54And it's just a joy.
46:55Everywhere you look, there are such interesting things going on.
46:58For example, the planting goes from the very conventional and recognisable to really quite dramatically modern,
47:05using grasses in ways that, you know, a lot of people would say are weeds, and that's not the way
47:09you do it.
47:10But because it's done so slickly and so well, it just feels sharp and utterly contemporary.
47:21The use of grasses is now highly fashionable, but Sylvie and Patrick Quibel, who made this garden from an open
47:29field,
47:30have established the perfect interplay between formal structure and the flowing sensuality of the content.
47:36It is like beautifully cut clothes that fit perfectly and yet allow the fabric to move and perform.
47:48So you can walk right in amongst the planting, and you have this incredible movement.
47:56The wind just sort of riffles through and fingers it.
47:59The sound, the texture, the way that you look through something to see everything else, just works superbly well.
48:09It's a really, really good example of how you work with a space, even if it's an unlikely one,
48:14and let things go within constraints, that makes something really special.
48:21The underlying design of this garden is based upon long-standing French formal gardening traditions,
48:30like the gardens at Versailles or Vaux-le-Vicomte, but expressed in a very modern way.
48:36So they're a grande allée, but they're created by mowing different heights of grass.
48:42The hedges are tightly clipped, but in flowing crests and waves.
48:47And there is formal water, but cut as another square into the mown grass.
48:56Well, I suppose the big question is, is this garden a work of art, or is it just a beautiful
49:03garden?
49:05Certainly, it's full of very sculptural, artistic ideas.
49:09And I think that this great block of green box is wonderful, thrilling.
49:17Now, it's a box, call it a hedge, call it anything you like, this is art for me.
49:23But the real way that this works is in the mind.
49:27It's got to be an idea.
49:29You've got to have the concept of art as a garden.
49:32And this is where the French excel.
49:35They love concepts.
49:37They're very good at intellectualising.
49:39Taking an idea and turning it into a garden and taking a garden and turning it into an idea and
49:45playing with it.
49:46And I think the gardens that we've seen here in France show that they can do what the British, quite
49:52frankly, feel embarrassed about.
49:54We're clumsy intellectually compared to them.
49:59I think this garden is beautiful as a garden, as well as crossing the line to becoming a fascinating work
50:05of art.
50:07But did Patrick and Sylvie make it with that in mind?
50:11It's called the Jardin Plume because we want to try to achieve that, honestly.
50:19It's a work.
50:19It's điềuious.
50:20It's about to be a garden so that we want to achieve that, though, that Myrtle.
50:23It's in harmony with, I don't know, the waves of organize, which means, this roll of permanents is fun
50:35that There, I don't know, everything is safe.
50:44Is it a garden like art?
50:51Great question.
50:54It's complicated.
50:56Art are often things that are created.
50:59A table, for example, is finished.
51:02A garden is maybe art, I don't know,
51:05but it will move.
51:07If the creators go or die,
51:11there is no garden.
51:12It's very particular.
51:15Is it art or not?
51:17Maybe some parts can make me think of art,
51:20because everything is drawn, structured.
51:26It's like a sculpture.
51:28Yes, but the thing is that it's ephemeral.
51:33It's a little ephemeral art, the garden.
51:38The ephemeral nature of gardening
51:40certainly does make it an elusive medium for art.
51:44But I think that this garden achieves it
51:46through the combination of its deceptively simple
51:49and pared-down layout
51:50and the way that the planting is encouraged
51:53to be so transitory and loose.
52:08there is one final stop to make on this journey.
52:11And it is the garden most strongly associated with art in the world,
52:16let alone France.
52:21It's late summer and I have returned to Claude Monet's garden
52:25at Givigny, also in Normandy.
52:35And this time I'm going to see the water lilies in flower
52:39in his famous water garden.
52:48When I came here in spring, obviously the water lilies weren't out at all.
52:53And it feels wrong to be in France and not come back and not see them.
53:00And there they are.
53:14By 1892, ten years after he moved here,
53:18Monet had made enough money from the sale of his paintings
53:21to purchase more land to make a large water garden
53:25loosely inspired by the Japanese prints that he collected.
53:30For the next 30 years, he was to paint it obsessively,
53:34even as the guns of the Western Front
53:36began to rumble within earshot of Givigny.
53:41It's funny, because I know what water lilies look like,
53:44but I confess that my initial reaction is one of being underwhelmed.
53:50It's somehow less than I expected.
53:54But actually that's unfair.
53:56It's unfair on the plant.
53:58It's unfair on Monet and the paintings because it's to get it wrong.
54:01The water lilies themselves are not important.
54:04What Monet was painting was the light.
54:07That's what obsessed him.
54:09And light on water, which bounces and is reflected
54:12and comes off at angles and shimmers
54:14and sinks slightly beneath the water,
54:17is endlessly fascinating.
54:22There's no doubt that the pond, with its elusive light,
54:26entranced Monet,
54:27as well as providing an escape from the loss of his wife
54:31and the horror of the First World War.
54:50Monet gave these eight huge panels to the nation in 1918,
54:55as a celebration of the end of the war.
54:58But he couldn't part with them or even stop working on them.
55:02And they weren't installed here until after his death in 1926.
55:07The paintings increase our artistic appreciation of the garden.
55:12And visiting the garden enables us to appreciate and understand the paintings all the more.
55:22And Givigny seems to have given Monet an endless canvas,
55:27which he could both plant and provide inspiration for his paintings.
55:36I think that where gardening is special,
55:39as opposed to all kinds of other ways of looking at the world,
55:43is the relationship of the gardener with the land is intimate.
55:47It's something that is very deep.
55:49And if it taps something inside you, then it can produce great art.
55:56And what makes French artistic gardens so particular
56:00is the ease with which they combine intellectual abstract concepts
56:05with an earthy love of plants.
56:13In this series, I've learnt so much about France and its gardens.
56:18From how the historic grandeur of Versailles was created...
56:24Wow!
56:24..to the way that the medieval monastic tradition makes a modern kitchen garden.
56:30I hope you like the vegetables.
56:32I love vegetables.
56:34From the evolving charm of Corrance,
56:36to the Michelin-starred restaurant producing all its own organic produce.
56:42It's got a body. This is a muscular tomato.
56:45And, of course, the influential formal potager at Villandry.
56:50And I've seen gardens that set the standard for gardens of their type
56:54right across the world.
56:57And as I've travelled round France,
56:59I've learnt that they still respect order, formality,
57:02and doing things in the correct manner.
57:05But they also take delight in abstract ideas and intellectual concepts.
57:12And the French have a deeply romantic streak,
57:16running from Josephine's Malmaison
57:18to the crazy but wonderful modern extravaganza of Champ de Bataille.
57:25I'm amazed.
57:28And above all, their love of style and flair
57:32in their gardens as in every aspect of life.
57:42When I came to France as a teenager,
57:46I was pretty sure what I wanted.
57:48I wanted light. I wanted art.
57:49I wanted the sort of creative impulse that seemed to come from the south.
57:56And, obviously, now I've got older.
57:57A lot of those things have gone.
57:58Some of them have matured and changed.
58:00Life's got complicated.
58:01But the more I visit gardens and travel,
58:04it's clear that two things happen.
58:07One, you start to piece your past together
58:10by this new and changing present.
58:12As you get older, things make, and through seeing gardens,
58:16it's the medium which I can measure out my world.
58:19And also, the more that you learn about a culture
58:22and a civilisation and a people
58:24through the way that they make gardens,
58:26the more that you learn about yourself.
58:35Come and celebrate the 90th birthday
58:37for one of Australia's most iconic and spectacular gardens,
58:41Cruden Farm,
58:42on the premiere of Inside Dame Elizabeth's Garden,
58:45next week.
58:46The End
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58:57The End