detail from Liberty, Equality, Fraternity 2012
Last week’s post looked at the history of the chateau at Chaumont-sur-Loire, now home to the famous international garden festival. This week’s is going to look at some of the inspirational, if sometimes [ok often] quirky, gardens that have been hosted there over the last twenty years or so that I’ve been going.
your author captured in a garden of distorting mirrors
In keeping with the silly season that seem to affect the press every year this is perhaps not my most serious piece of well-researched garden history, but it does show that gardens can be humorous too!
To start with the festival lasts for months, and combines permanent planting and installations with dozens of temporary ones. It attracts designers and artists from round the world. It values innovation and sustainability more than most, and recycles materials and plants from year to year. It’s also open access, relatively inexpensive and surprisingly uncrowded. Bits of it can be brilliant, others wild and wacky, and sometimes there are miserable failures or a complete mess but thats part of the fun and excitement of going. You never know what you’re going to find!
I was sitting in the garden a while back enjoying the weather and discussing politics with a group of family and friends when the subject of a piece in a well-known newspaper came up and my niece said to my mother: “Sorry, Nan, I don’t EVER want to read an article in the Daily M***, I rather read anything…anything …even a history of hosepipes” So to make sure she always has an alternative here it is!
