The May/June 2011 issue of Garden Design magazine features an article about topiary that includes some photographs of La Louve in Bonnieux, France, whose current owner I met in 2009 when I toured her and her husband (who owns Clos du Peyronnet in Menton) around some of Thomas Church’s gardens in the San Francisco Bay area. La Louve features a variety of organically sculpted plants that includes santolina, rosemary, lavender, juniper and teucrium, in addition to boxwood, and the shapes are mostly soft and rounded.
Simultaneously, one of my clients gave me an article mainly about boxwood from the New York Times (“Home” section, Thursday, May 19, 2011), which prompted me to order the Boxwood Handbook from the American Boxwood Society so I could learn more about the hundreds of varieties of these versatile plants, as well as how to properly care for them.
Robert Hunter Winery - pool area designed by Thomas Church
Just two weeks ago, my husband and I visited the Robert Hunter Winery in Sonoma to see the Thomas Church garden there and learned about Ann Smith Hunter who has some remarkable specimens of boxwoods she has collected over a lifetime.
Anyone who studies the work of Thomas Church knows how often he specified boxwood in the gardens he designed. Church’s favorite gardens were Italian Renaissance gardens because of their simplicity, low maintenance, and what he considered their perfect compositions. Church tended to select evergreen plants to anchor his garden designs so they would look well year round, leaving the selection of flowers to his clients. In his writings, he dispelled the notion that clipped parterres were somehow antithetical to his low-maintenance garden intentions, explaining that they required pruning only twice a year to preserve their beauty.
All of these recent occurences reminded me that I had not gotten around to writing about one of the most extraordinary topiary boxwood gardens I have visited: Les Jardins de Marqueyssac near Vézac, France.
We were drawn to this garden by a brochure in the hotel where we stayed in nearby Sarlat. The drive through the river valley, wrapped by rugged limestone hills clothed in evergreen oaks, with the occasional chateau turret or steep-pitched stone roofs peeking through also took us to La Roque-Gageac and Beynac. Marqueyssac is in the path of wine connoisseurs trekking between the Bordeaux and Rhone wine regions as well. The narrow plateau that rises over steep cliffs is an exceptional site with extraordinary gardens, decidedly vaut le détour.
The Château was built at the end of the 17th century by Bertrand Vernet de Marqueyssac, Counselor to Louis XIV. In its restored state, it still has the lauze roof (limestone slab).
17th century wall
The original garden, which is said to have been designed by Porcher--a student of André Le Nôtre--in the mid-18th century, followed the formal tradition of French châteaux, with terraces and allées surrounding the château.
The geometric boxwood terraces on the south and east sides of the château are from Porcher’s era, but little else remains of his work except the structural hardscape elements, which are more than incidental: the fortifications and the stone belvedere which commands a 360º view of the valley.
Julien Bessières (Henri Géraud Julien, Chevalier Bessières et de l'Empire) who was the député for the Dordogne in 1827, held the property from 1830 to 1840 and added the Gothic chapel along with a 100 meter long grand allée for horseback riding.
The great transformation of the gardens into the boxwood extravaganza that they are today took place in the 1860s when it was inherited by Julien de Cerval, a magistrate from nearby Sarlat. De Cerval was enamored by Italian gardens from his younger years serving in the military in Italy and wanted to emulate the foothills of the Apennines in his interpretation of the Italianate theme. Initially he built more small buildings evocative of Italian domestic architecture, with loggias and foursquare, pantiled roofs.
Cypresses and umbrella pines (Pinus pinea) were brought from Italy to anchor the terraces and shade the four miles of walks he laid out across the 37-acre site. The vegetation on the south face of the plateau is mainly of Mediterranean origin: evergreen and truffle oaks (Quercus ilex and Quercus pubescens), junipers (Juniperus communis) and Montpelier maples (Acer monspessulanum) and umbrella pines; while the north side is mainly deciduous and an overall lighter shade of greens, reminiscent of Le Nôtre’s greatest gardens (think: Versailles): limes (Tilia platyphyllos), hornbeams (Carpinus betulus) and robinias. He planted 150,000 boxwoods (Buxus sempervirens) and pruned them into the rather unusual organic, undulating forms that made the gardens unique.
He also built underground cisterns to hold rain water, adding to the existing ones from the first castle, to ensure ample water for all the trees and box.
De Cerval was a bit of a maniac who spent the last 30 years of his life building the boxwood gardens, with an exuberance for detail and definite purpose in the layout--he intended for visitors to get lost along the tree-enclosed paths so they would be obliged to enjoy the whimsical topiary. His goal was to bring people from all over the world to experience his rhapsody in green.
Unfortunately, despite the efforts of the owners after de Cerval, in the latter half of the 20th century while the château was infrequently occupied, the gardens suffered neglect . Kléber Rossillon (heir to the Schlumberger family fortune--who later lost millions to the Bernie Madoff scheme) acquired the property in the nick of time. Kléber grew up just 3 kilometers from Marqueyssac and was inspired as a child by his parents’ efforts to rescue nearby Château de Castelnaud.
When he finished his schooling, Kléber took on and successfully restored Castelnaud himself. His success set him on a course of restoration that led to the foundation of the Kléber Rossillon society which restores cultural sites. The aquisition of Marqueyssac in 1996 provided him with a challenging new project which he aimed to complete in a mere year’s time.
Stripping off the overgrowth to uncover the stone walls and paths revealed that the boxwood had grown into trees. Kléber set about restoring the clipped topiary and hedges and planted 3,000 new boxwood plants to fill the gaps.
Unlike Porcher’s terrace d’honneur where the boxwood is pruned into rigidly geometric forms, the soft organic forms of de Cerval’s topiary reflect the undulating contours of the surrounding hills. Except for the naturalized cyclamen (Cyclamen hederifolium) introduced by de Cerval, there are no flowers per se in the garden, but balls of box on stripped trunks that pop above the supple forms, simulate them.
Kléber also managed to link the château and the wooded paths to the belvedere with the topiary gardens by planting a serpentine path with santolina and rosemary.
He installed automatic irrigation and built a rivulet that runs from the belvedere, with two cascades, into pools, drawing water from the rainwater cisterns. In keeping with the Italian Renaissance low-maintenance tradition, the gardens are tended by only four gardeners and the boxwood topiaries are pruned by hand twice a year--spring and autumn.
When the work was completed in March 1997, Kléber opened the gardens to the public. Since then they have been designated as one of the “Notable Gardens of France” by the Committee of Parks and Gardens of the Ministry of Culture, a distinction that no doubt would have pleased Julien de Cerval. Work continues in a romantic vein with additions of contemporary sculpture and new arbors.
Les Jardins de Marqueyssac are one of the few attractions in the Dordogne that is open year round. They have special qualities in every season even though the plants are almost exclusively evergreen. In summer, the gardens magically sparkle with candelight on Thursday evenings, much like Villandry and Vaux le Vicomte. Even in winter on a sunlit day it is spectacular to see the gardens appearing to float on a cloud as the mist rises from the river and envelopes the cliff.
