Le Jardin Plume: A Modern Impressionist Masterpiece in Normandy - Gardenista
For anyone hankering after European formality—only a touch, we’re not talking Versailles—<a href="https://lejardinplume.com/">Le Jardin Plume</a> in Upper Normandy is just the ticket.
Photography by Claire Takacs.
Le Jardin Plume in Auzouville-sur-Ry, near Rouen, France. A network of hedges near the house has an early-20th-century English look: Different styles are accommodated because they are all connected.
Visible beyond the pool are the silhouettes of apple trees young and old, in the orchard.
An old sheep pasture around the trees is reconfigured as a giant parterre, with an orchard in it. The base note in this garden is still a series of fruit trees, but they have been incorporated into a vast parterre, with long grass marking the divisions, with miscanthus in the foreground.
Orchard Garden
By midsummer, the flowery meadow has been scythed and collected into haystacks, while longer miscanthus grass is allowed to stay.
Inside precision-cut enclosures of boxwood, tall perennials are allowed to express themselves. Hedges, everywhere, establish an ancient atmosphere while doubling up as a network of useful windbreaks.
Feather Garden
The Plume, or Feather Garden. Le Jardin Plume was named after the effect of vertical grasses around the garden.
Informal planting around the old barns, including euphorbia and Melianthus major.
Further informality in a seating area by the nursery shop.
Sunset-colored plants clamber over the neat edges and corners of the formal parterre. The design of the Summer Garden is a nod to the Baroque style; decorative formality at its most grand.
The Summer Garden
Nasturtiums undermine the formality of the Summer Garden.
The formality of very straight walls of boxwood in the garden beyond gives way to rounder shapes, in a castle meets cottage atmosphere that is reminiscent of Sissinghurst, just across the English channel.
Boxwood Balls
Boxwood topiary is given height by a few taller specimens as well as walls of hornbeam.
Tight clipping toward the end of summer gives months-long neatness while everything around changes color and shape.
Empty arches and shaggy topiary give this garden an informal structure even when the jewel-like dahlias and helianthemums have faded and the trailing Erigeron annus has withdrawn.
The Flower Garden
Ideas for dividing a lawn. A classic French allée, marked out in the simplest way, with earth gutters on either side.