Clever vegetable gardens pack ever more into ever smaller spaces. Scaling down suits modern scaled-down gardens. I have recently visited a stunning example going against the trend and scaling up. At Versailles, in 1678, Louis XIV commissioned a royal vegetable garden of 23 acres, the potager du roi which still survives. It is ignored or under-appreciated by most of the visitors to Versailles’ enormous park and palace. It is fascinating.
At 10 Rue du Maréchal Joffre, in the bookshop at the potager’s entrance, I met my historical helpers, Mathilde Augé, directrice of the World Monuments Fund in Paris, and Meredith Wiggins, an environmental researcher and archaeologist with the fund. Beyond us, in glaring sunshine, stretched dozens of splayed fruit trees, formal beds and vegetables edged by scorched grass paths and worn hard surfacing. The WMF experts stepped out and gave me an outline of the garden’s history.
As his court at Versailles grew, Louis XIV wanted a huge potager to provide fruit, vegetables, herbs and flowers for the royal table. He insisted on a site near his palace and picked one known as the “stinking pond”. For five years, from 1678 to 1683, workers drained the swamp and laid out a formal garden. As the existing soil was so poor, they carted in fresh soil from a faraway hill.
The garden was created in 1678-1683 over 23 acres © Arnauld Duboys Fresney
At Versailles, the main landscape gardens and waterworks are masterpieces by André Le Nôtre, a genius known to everyone interested in garden history. Le Nôtre did not design or supervise the king’s vegetable garden, where the grand central court had 16 square beds and another 29 interrelated gardens. It was the masterpiece of another hero, under-appreciated in English histories of gardening.
I am not referring to Sabine de Barra, the fictional gardener who was played by Kate Winslet in that excruciatingly unhistorical film A Little Chaos, released in 2014. De Barra was presented as impressing Le Nôtre and then the king himself with her love of roses and her own informal style of gardening in her little back yard. The result ranks high in my list of unmissably silly films. It ends with De Barra designing a bosquet, or clipped grove, with fountains for the king’s delight, whereas in real life the potager was designed, planted and supervised by master gardener Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie. I bow to him across the centuries.
Before my visit I knew de La Quintinie for his book on the cultivation of fruit and vegetables, published posthumously in 1690. I assumed he was just a specialist in training French fruit trees into virtuoso shapes like clipped green poodles, but he was far more than that. As a cultivator, innovator and organiser, he towers over us.
One of the garden’s apple trees © Charles de Valroger
Globe artichokes
He writes of how he tried 100 varieties of melon before deciding on the best two. As figs were a special love of the king, he planted 700 fig trees and trained them to produce ripe fruits: one of the best was called Angélique. He calibrated the differing qualities of animal manures. He manipulated the seasons of fruit and vegetables by planting them in sunny or shady aspects, ingeniously contrived. He produced strawberries in late March, green peas, a new fashion at court, in April, and asparagus in December. Aptly, a bronze statue of him with a branch of a fruit tree in one hand looks over the huge potager he devised and ran with a team of 30 gardeners.
De La Quintinie produced strawberries in late March, green peas, a new fashion at court, in April, and asparagus in December
It is amazing that his ground plan is still visible. Nearly 340 years have passed since his death, a period full of royal, then revolutionary, French history. The garden is about to leap forward again as the World Monuments Fund is backing a major upgrade and phased restoration. In the early 1990s, so Augé and Wiggins explained, Hubert de Givenchy, then chair of the WMF, shared an evening walk in Versailles with Bunny Mellon, second wife of the oil magnate Paul. She was an avid gardener, a regular critic of my writings, corresponding from her home in Oak Springs, Virginia, and a generous supporter of items in garden history and practice.
After a fine dinner in the château, Givenchy and Mellon strolled, as Louis XIV often did, down a sloping path to the royal gate which blocks the entrance to the potager. Mellon was amazed by what she then saw inside, a revelation to her, as to me. Convinced that it needed to be preserved, she bestowed funds from the charitable foundation she had created in memory of her father, Gerard B Lambert, and propelled a restoration of the gilded formal gate and the garden court’s central fountain.
A team of 15 gardeners and 50 volunteers maintains the potager
Over Zoom, the potager’s head gardener Ivan Thé and its director Alexandra Bonnet explained some of the changes and challenges they have had to confront. No garden stands still. De La Quintinie trained fruit trees in complex shapes against walls, but in open spaces he grew them only as bushes without any solid metal frames. He never grew box hedges, either. Like metal frames, box hedging, I learnt, came into the potager only in the 19th century. It has yet to attract the box moth which is ruining box-leaves in gardens elsewhere.
Thé directs a team which numbers 15 gardeners, helped by 50 volunteers. In summer, rhubarb, globe artichokes and rows of potatoes cover broad areas between the low-trained espalier fruit trees. These trees’ shoots looked too vertical to me, but Thé explained that they were about to receive their summer pruning, a taille en vert. No mechanised clippers are used for it. Since 2010, pesticides and weedkillers have been banned too. To control carrot fly, the gardeners plant garlic, a trick that never works in my garden.
We discussed quinces, agreeing that they are robust trees in dry climates. We also discussed spinach, no good in dry summers, and green sorrel, whose lemony leaves are my top choice as a filling for an omelette: de La Quintinie grew three varieties of it. The WMF has just held an international conference on cultivating resilience in order to pool ideas for the management of historic gardens and landscapes in a hotter climate, whether the moat round the Tower of London or a sacred grove in Nigeria. Quinces and sorrel are suited to the new age.
Yellow tomatoes © Charles de Valroger
In 1782, Alexandre Brown, English by origin, was chosen to be the potager’s head gardener. Seven years later, the revolution broke out but, like other royal monuments, the potager survived; it was rebranded as a garden for the Republic. In due course it acquired a crucial role as a human seedbed. It became a training ground for pupils, now members of the Higher National School of Landscape Gardening beside the potager, of which Bonnet is also director. They learn to garden as well as to design. They even learn how to prune fruit trees into complex formal shapes.
Recommended
Gardening is a skilled craft. Like others it will die if it is not transmitted. I had no idea until a month ago of this school’s existence though it produces many of France’s top public gardeners. In Britain we have a Royal Horticultural Society and a king who is an apostle of organic practice in his garden at Highgrove. What we need is to unite them in a way that France cannot. We need a royal school in which to train skilled gardeners, heirs to de La Quintinie and his royal patron, who liked to come and learn to garden in person.
A picture caption has been amended
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram