Bitter blackberries?

I've just got back from a week's holiday on the North coast of Norfolk, a new landscape for me -  sand dunes, long sandy beaches, and a distinctive vernacular architecture of flint and brick.  More of Norfolk another day!

Whilst away I was bemused by an article in Guardian (7 September, Patrick Barkham) - 'And Now for a Very Peculiar Autumn' . I don't know where Patrick lives, or when he starts his Autumn calendar, but by my reckoning we were only 7 days into Autumn when the article was published. And whilst the article bemoaned the 'season of unripened fruit, sour blackberries, and piddling conkers' it said nothing of the magnificence of the late summer harvest we have had this year. It's been an August of fruits and berries such as I can scarcely remember - plums, damsons and cherries dripping off the trees and coating the footpaths and lanes, sloes and hips bursting from the hedgerows, rowanberries, berberis, and argusier berries colouring the trees and bushes with jewel like intensity.

If we were living 500 years ago I'm sure this would have been remembered as a great year for free food, a summer and autumn to fill our cupboards with jams and fruit cheeses, syrups, pickles and dried fruits to shore us up against winter cold and the early hungry gap.

But yes, I admit, some of the blackberries have been bitter! But there's plenty of autumn left yet.

Body and Soul - the 2010 Garden Festival, Chaumont sur Loire

Cheveux des Anges - Angels' Hair

This year's Chaumont Festival featured 26 gardens designed around concepts of 'body and soul' . Interpretations ranged from the ethereal and other-worldly 'Cheveux des Anges' (Angel's hair,  above) to the drily ironic ' Le vilain petit jardin de Jean-Michel Vilian (Jack's Ugly Garden).

Le vilain petit jardin de Jean-Michel Vilain

Jack's Ugly Garden was one my favourites - a wry comment on both the theme of the festival, and the perfectionism associated with 'show' gardens. In Jack's Ugly Garden we are introduced not to a peaceful and harmonious space, beautifully designed to rest both body and soul, but the neglected, random, and hostile space of a grumpy old man. Here, Jack's dirty linen is hung out to dry, his toilet is open to view, his vegetables abandoned, his annoying and unwelcome visitor pushed into the nettles. It feels like all our gardening sins and bad-tempered moments collected into one place. It brings a smile to everybody's face (although I did see one woman pick-up the artfully placed litter -a can of Red Bull thrust into the postbox on the garden gate -  and tidy it away with an annoyed shake of her head).

Hortitherapie sensorielle

Le jardin qui chante

A lot of gardens followed through the theme of body and soul with concepts related to therapy and well-being - some were a bit literal for (even) my taste, although I loved 'Un Divan au Jardin'  where an iconic psychotherapist's couch was placed beneath the only 'listener' in the garden, a tree, 'silent and benevolent' .  One of the most striking images of the festival was the steel sculpture of a man laying down in the garden 'Hortitherapie sensorielle' - shaped from rounds of rusted    steel, lying full stretch and seemingly contented and relaxed across the space. Other gardens looked at the healing properties of tea (Bon thé, Bon genre - Posh Tea, Posh People) and herbs (Le carré des simples), or the therapeutic sound of birdsong  (Le jardin qui chante - The singing garden) which featured dozens of bird nesting boxes, each with a description of a bird species, its eggs, and a recording of its song which played on pressing a button, and filled that area of the festival grounds with an intriguing and improbable mix of song. 

Ma Terre, Mater

Themes of birth, and the metaphores of earth and womb, sky and soul were also explored. One of my favourite gardens of the show was 'Ma Terre, Mater' in which the visitor is taken on a barefoot, spiralling journey through soft planting and different textures to the centre or womb of the garden, and then 'born' through a tunnel-like exit. 

Homage à Lady Day

For the me, the most beautiful and haunting gardens were those which took an oblique interpretation of the theme -   'Homage à Lady Day', shamelessly punning on 'Soul' to present the music of Bille Holiday in a garden that was a surreal interpretation of a jazz club, with a grand piano seeming to float in a field of flowers.  'Caligrame' was a beautiful and subtle interpretation of the theme, deriving from Shintoism and communication with the souls of ancestors, and the plants that are used to make ceremonial papers. 'Métampsychose' ruminated hauntingly on the ancestors of the designer, portrayed by photographs in the garden as souls reincarnated as birds. But perhaps my favourite of all these was 'Le jardin de terre gaste', (The Wasteland) a mediation on the soul and intent of gardens in the modern world, on the traditional role of the garden as a place of retreat and rest for the soul and body, and a more modern role as a symbol of resistance to and even attack on an encroaching materialism and a desert - or wasteland - of the soul. The resting places in the garden offered the visitor a retreat, and the chance to contemplate the role of the garden in our hearts and in society through the words of writers such as Ian Hamilton Finlay - 'Garden Centres will become the Jacobins of the new revolution' ! 

Le jardin de la terre gaste