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Chapter Seven: Flower Shows
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Flower Shows 0715_FINAL_384pp.indd 318 8/10/10 1:45:07 PM , 319 B Courson: French International Flower Sale Before I settled in for this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, I crossed the Channel to attend the increasingly popular plant sale known as the Journées des plantes de Courson. What began in 1982 as an informal plant exchange between members of the Association des Parcs Botaniques de France has blossomed into one of the most exciting horticultural events in Europe, due to the gracious hospitality of Hélène and Patrice Fustier, the owners of the seventeenth -century chateau of Courson, thirty-five kilometers south of Paris. Twice a year, in May and October, more than twenty thousand people cross the chateau’s moat and pass into the stable yard to enter the landscaped park and arboretum where more than 150 nurseries from France, England, Holland, and Germany spread out their young plants, many of them rare, on the lawns or under trees. The beauty of Courson is its informality. Even in teeming rain, it is a festive market scene that has the advantage of blending in with the landscape. With trellises and arbors set around the perimeters, along with several white marquees for dining, the setting seems like a permanent installation, a kind of garden fair where friends might meet every day on patches of lawn between plant displays to discuss their gardening hopes. Judith L. Pillsbury, an art dealer from Paris, bypassed conversation to make a beeline for the Nicotiana sylvestris. Nicotiana, it appears, is difficult to find in France, despite the fact that it is named after Jean Nicot, who introduced tobacco to the French Court in the sixteenth century. Armed with capacious baskets, members of the aristocracy, many accomFacing page: Jonathan Player, Landscape architect Mark Anthony Walker and his seventeenth-century French classical garden, Chelsea Flower Show, London, 1994. 0715_FINAL_384pp.indd 319 8/10/10 1:45:07 PM [44.221.43.208] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:18 GMT) c h a p t e r s e v e n 320 panied by their gardeners, select their plants. The marquise de Ravenel drove a hundred kilometers to visit the stand of Michel Rivière, whose family has cultivated peonies for six generations, a national collection with more than six hundred varieties under cultivation near Montélimar. Business was also brisk at the stand of Pépinière de la Foux, a garden center near Toulon that specializes in salvias. Since 1982, the collection has been increased from a dozen varieties to the current 150 with the help of botanic gardens in France. The object was to promote salvias for more unusual summer plantings along the Côte d’Azur. The New York public garden designer Lynden B. Miller was delighted to discover a blue Salvia guaranitica for the Connecticut-style garden she has designed at this year’s International Festival of Gardens at Chaumont-sur-Loire. Many plants are loosely displayed to suggest combinations to gardeners, particularly for borders. Cuckoo Pen Nursery, which traveled to Courson from Oxford, created both sun and shade gardens by banking potted plants in small groupings at various heights. And André Gayraud created a naturalistic but striking effect by arranging, under an existing grove of trees, a woodland garden consisting of a vast collection of white hydrangea plants interspersed by a single red rose bush. The treillage or trelliswork pavilions that Bertrand Servenay brought to the show were painted in the same blue-gray that has become the new historically based color for the orange tree planters at Versailles. With a bit of frou-frou to decorate the trellis roofs, the austere classical pavilions can be transformed into rococo or chinoiserie creations. And Bruno Caron of Damblemont was at the ready to give the history of the French garden seats he displayed against instant walls of moss and ivy. Closer to architecture than to furniture, these massive historic forms, some with flat balusters in the seat back that date back to Marly in the seventeenth century, were shaped to shed rather than to retain rain water. The weather cooperated in the demonstration. The prize-giving ceremony outdoors was a jovial event under a sea of umbrellas with Hélène Fustier in her trademark felt fedora making everyone feel like a personal guest. I was particularly alert to the Blérancourt prize for the best specimen of an American plant. Named after the museum outside of Paris...