Hoeing carrots in a medieval “courtil,” an Old French word for an enclosed garden next to a house — today’s “potager.”
Chère amie, cher ami,
“Quelque chose pour la dent creuse!” exclaimed Henry.
He ladled an ample spoonful of jam onto his tartine.
It was one of the lively expressions we knew from a neighbor, missing many teeth herself, who was fond of cooking for hungry young men.
“Something for the hollow tooth!” she would say, prying open an empty ice cream tub to reveal stacks of home-made gâteaux secs.
Hard work had made her hands large and gnarled her fingers with arthritis. But though her back was stooped, her movements were deft and efficient. Madame Celestine stocked her larder with home-made preserves, conserves, pâtés and four secs, buttery biscuits. She fed her army of cats and her flock of hens with leftovers. And she forked over, planted, and weeded her own garden beds.
Like herself, the potager was neither well-groomed nor new. But it was practical and the result of many years of experience. It was she who pressed upon me a clutch of tiny strawberry plants to put in our fledgling garden beds. She had been pruning runners from their pieds mères.
I tucked the strawberries in among flowers in the walled garden of the Orangerie. The undoing of this system was our first gardener. Weedkiller and vigorous hoeing were his preferred methods of spring garden work.
It’s been several years since those days. Raspberries and strawberries, along with old pear trees and roses, now grow along the stable walls in the haras. But at last, we are planning a new potager at the Chateau. It will be in the field next to the loge.
In the days of the last comte and his horse-breeding ventures, the loge had housed a head groom and farm manager. The field had been a pasture. A rangée of new box stalls, dating from the 1970s, separated it from the park behind the Chateau. Stallions lived in the old Protestant temple in its far corner. They took the air in small enclosures outside the old holy place, behind tall walls of concrete slab. The effect, while not beautiful, was solid. The stallions couldn’t see their rivals behind the walls, and they couldn’t kick through to them either.
The field and Protestant Temple. Built in the 1600s, the Temple was turned into stables and a dovecote.
The stallion, their mates and the occupant of the loge had departed by the time the comte died at the dawn of the 21st century. Poking through the box stalls and remises of the haras, we found a cobwebbed sign for the stud thrown on top of an old oil tank. I resisted the temptation to resuscitate the Haras de Courtomer, and we did away with the slab walls.
But as we discovered when looking through old photographs, before its transformation into an equine greensward, the field had been an immense potager. It had supplied the Chateau with vegetables for the table. It grew fodder, like potatoes and cabbages, for the pigs and other animals in the basse-cour. The domestiques,those who worked and lived on the domain, grew their vegetables here, too.
By the time we arrived, only a handful of lettuces and a parsley plant grew in a tiny plot. It had been carved out of the lawn in front of the Chateau, close to hand. The domestiques, like the horses and pigs, the potatoes and cabbages, were long gone.
A new era had dawned at about the time the count transformed the grand potager into a grand paddock. The first supermarché opened in our département of the Orne in 1972, in nearby Flers. The courtil of yore, the enclosed garden plot attached to houses in village and farm, and used for home food production, was no longer a necessity. It was a luxury.
We had too many renovations on our hands to worry about a potager. Our old gardien plowed up a strip, now forgotten and overgrown, for his tomatoes and onions. The rough pasture grass was mown as hay.
But now, with many renovations behind us and a new gardener at hand, I’ve been making sketches and marking pages in gardening books.
Having recently visited a vast kitchen garden with my sister, I have more ideas for the new potager.
The owners of this garden, both of whom have written successful cookbooks and own a country house restaurant, had given full rein to their enthusiasms. Large pottery cloches cover the new growth in the rhubarb beds, keeping the young stalks tender. There is an herb garden, a water garden, berry bushes, fruit trees, a maze, a shell house, a pond with duck houses and, out in a field, contemporary statuary around a gazebo made of shiny steel wire. There is a charming potting shed with an earthen floor. And an enormous glass house for forcing tomatoes.
When the tender stalks push the caps off the clay "cloches," the rhubarb is ready to harvest.
My sister is an experienced garden designer and maker.
“I think less could be more,” she remarked, looking at me doubtfully.
A few days later, we visited another garden. This one is an archeological reconstruction, based on the actual 16th-century plantings and layout. Pollen from core samples had revealed the plants used. Excavated traces of garden beds, walls, wells, and tree stumps dictated the design.
“Very plain for the Renaissance,” I commented, expecting the elaborate “broderie” of early French gardens.
But this was not a garden for a châtelaine and her guests to look down upon from an upstairs window. It was a jardin nourricier, meant for consumption. It was long and narrow, attached to the house, bounded with walls.
A simple parterre of clipped boxwood surrounded a tiny lawn with a bench at one end. Neat blocks of winter vegetables and herbs were laid out between gravel paths. There was an orchard with a strip of rosebushes in the center. A deep well dated from medieval times when the property had been part of a Cistercian monastery. There was a superb dove house on stilts.
“More practical,” suggested my sister. “Especially without the parterre.”
Replace the well with a spigot for watering, she added. “Plus, you already have a pigeonnier.”
The former Temple, deconsecrated following the expulsion of Protestants in 1685, became a dovecote before it was a stable. Niches for the pigeons can still be seen in the south-facing wall.
Nine centuries or more of history humbles one. I’m going to start small.
I have already started researching the vegetables, herbs and fruits that would have been grown when the seigneurie of Courtomer was first mentioned in the 11th century.
Newer varieties, introduced during the Renaissance years of war and trade, will have their place.
The Renaissance saw a burgeoning interest in careful observation of new and known plants. Fragaria vesca, the wild fraise de bois was grown in the royal gardens on the Louvre in the 14th century. Above, an annotated drawing for the "Historia plantarum" of botanist Conrad Gessner (1515-1565).
So will select subjects from Louis XIV’s Potager du Roi, created in 1678 by the gardener La Quintinie. In the king’s vast “potager” at Versailles, courtiers and visiting dignitaries were invited to marvel not only at the sheer quantity of vegetables and fruits, but at exotic novelties, like the potato, pumpkin, and tomato from the Americas.
There was also the strawberry. The fraisier de Virginie was a delectable curiosity brought to France by Jacques Cartier, explorer of Canada, in the 1540s. Later bred with another American variety, the fraisier de Chili, the American strawberry gave rise to all modern garden varieties of the strawberry plant.
“On les croquerai à belles dents!”
With big teeth, we shall eat them.
And perhaps share a few plantules with our neighbor.
A bientôt, au Chateau!
Dear Elisabeth, you write such delightfully researched pieces. And always accompanied by such illustrative photos! In all, there is inevitably something new and novel to know - "The King's Potager"?! Of the many books and movies with Versailles as the background, I seem to have missed it completely; even on my visit there! Thank you for your simple, and cheery but rich and abundant prose, that always sets me wondering at the infinite possibilities ....!
The clay "cloches" are very interesting. I suppose you use the tender rhubarb stalks the same as the hardened ones? Though I would not expect the stalks to be red but pale yellow.
Thank you, Elisabeth for your posts. Unless you write these way in advance, I take it you are in France by yourself as Bill has been writing from Ireland the past several weeks. I've been married for 43 years now, and while I don't mind having my husband around all the time (retired five years ago), it would be lovely for me if he would go somewhere (anywhere) for a few weeks. Some times I just yern to be alone in my own home.