A radical innovation was introduced at my mother’s 18th-century chateau last summer. On my visit to the home in Picardy she inherited three decades ago from her grandfather, there was no sign of a kitchen bin anywhere, just a compost bucket and three plastic bags attached to the wall by a rusty wire contraption. The strips of masking tape above each one, pencilled ‘bread’, ‘plastics’ ‘cardboard’, had long since come unstuck. ‘We recycle everything here,’ Maman announced when I asked where the bin was. But where do you put your uneaten food, old sponges, holey socks - the landfilling essentials I have no idea how to avoid? Within days of my arrival with friends, all three bags were filling up with all kinds of rubbish and any chance of order, let alone efficient recycling, was shot to pieces. Maman didn’t seem to mind – her world no longer really involves non-recyclables – but I found it maddening and so set my alarm to catch the 7am
bus into town, the only one. I returned triumphantly hauling a big, shiny new dual compartment kitchen bin and was greeted with a laugh. As soon as I left for England, it was hidden out of sight.
My mother was first introduced to permaculture early on in her custodianship. A friend told her about a little magazine called Les Quatre Saisons du Jardinage (The Four Seasons of Gardening), in which it often featured. She was taken with how simple it seemed, and realised she was already putting some of its principles into practice – mostly by ‘leaving things as they were and not interfering with nature when it wasn’t necessary, not weeding when the weeds were beneficial, and especially not le
aving the earth bare. I felt I was Mr Jourdain in Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who is delighted to learn he has been speaking prose without knowing it.’
Friends wanted to help with her new project, with its dovecote, park ‘a l’anglaise’, ‘potager’, orchard and woodland walk, an ambitious undertaking given that she had spent the previous thirty years mostly ignoring a small, unruly patch of garden is Islington while she made her mark on the fringes of the music and art scene. ‘It wasn't easy,’ she remembers, ‘in that I had to turn down all sort of well-wishers only too anxious to have me turn over patches of the kitchen garden on the pretext of having it "cleaned”’.’
The chateau’s gardens had been well maintained when she arrived in 1994. Abundant flowerbeds flourished, though the rosebushes in my parents’ wedding photographs had vanished, along with many trees she had climbed on her childhood holidays there. Her immediate wish was to simplify. ‘Permaculture is all about nurturing the earth,’ she explains from London, ‘rather than tampering with it with obnoxious tools and practices. Let it be!’
In her grandparents’ time, their chauffeur/gardener/guardian lived with his family in a little house on the grounds, but by the 90s, he had moved out and a skinhead couple with a Rottweiler called Thor lived there for security. When they acquired a second Rottweiler, Igor, it was time for them to go. Maman also dispensed with the closed-minded gardener in favour of an army of volunteers and another chateau owner, who would rope in his family to work on his magnificent gardens at Digeon. With his help, her kitchen garden was transformed from a shapeless plot of earth between box hedges to a classic arrangement of four squares with a cherry tree at their centre, in which plantations change annually – there are always potatoes, beans, tomatoes and carrots.
For 23 years, Maman looked after the garden with the help of close to a thousand Wwoofers, ie Worldwide Workers On Organic Farms, from Brazil to Norway. Hearing of her trouble with the gardener, and his lack of enthusiasm for organic production, a visiting journalist had told Maman she’d be the ideal Wwoof host, so she wrote to the organisation, only to be turned down ‘because I wasn’t a proper gardener’. She wrote again, this time saying she would host gardening seminars with the journalist and would open to the public. As well as being accepted, she was offered the role of setting up Wwoof in France, which she turned down. The hundreds of warm, appreciative messages in the visitors’ books here bear witness to the time and care she gave to all those who came for a fortnight or so, toiling outside in all weathers as she taught them the ways of permaculture.
Gradually, Maman learnt that ‘it’s a matter of measures’. Plants can invade one another, so weeding is needed to help beans along for instance, and a layer of old cloth or cardboard isolates plants so they may grow unhindered. The magazine made her realize she wasn’t alone in employing these methods in Picardy, and helped her connect with other practitioners. A farm owner nearby, it turned out, teac
hes permaculture at Amiens university.
‘Every year,’ she writes, ‘I have trouble with Didier [her trusty handyman] threatening to turn over the kitchen garden with a machine. What I want is the minimum of work and the earth to be covered up, with branches, old carpets, cardboard and with no soil showing except right at the beginning before the plants grow. Compost plays a big part. A large piece of cardboard covered with it is the start of the kitchen garden. I plant directly onto compost, which has been sieved on to a wheelbarrow. Some long planks of red-painted wood, salvaged from an old art installation, are used both to stand on and plant from without crushing the ground with my weight, and also as a nice straight marker for the vegetables.’
There have been mistakes along the way, though, as when she turfed over a flowerbed in front of the balustrade because she disliked its red and yellow colour scheme, a decision that foreshortened the landscape. A romantic plan was drawn up for a forest garden on an adjacent plot of land, an agronomic system that would mimic the structure of a natural forest. But several years on, she found that ‘it grew too fast and I couldn’t keep up with the pruning. And now even its horseshoe-shaped path has gone and there is no room for the farmer to bring his manure. We collect yellow and blue plums there, and walnuts of course, but you’ll struggle to find what is on the original drawing.’
As we talk by messenger about all this, me in France, her in London with my father, I am sorting out her boxes of corroded wires and frayed string, untangling them and winding them into bobbins as she writes her replies, occasionally, guiltily, discarding the weakest. As she said, she recycles everything. The wires are used to support raspberries, for example, or hold back strong branches that don’t need cutting. The string to tie a bundle of ancient herbs maybe, or attach old CDs to a stake to scare off birds. She’d like me to fetch more of it from a local farm, so as to keep Pincel, the golden Spanish horse that is spending the winter here, away from new shoots. She is excited about the manure he’ll produce, but I fret about our trampled lawns and the fifty leeks he’s bound to snack on before they are ready for us to enjoy.
Every morning, as I wait for hot water to travel up the ancient pipes from the cellar, I fill a watering can with cold water from the shower head for Pincel to drink. The garden taps have been blocked since rates skyrocketed a few years ago, but, again thanks to permaculture, three outdoor rain water tanks were added to the tarnished old one that ‘doesn’t work but looks good’, so there is enough to quench her sustainable garden, ‘which is better for the plants and doesn’t cost the earth like tap water’. Lugging the cans around isn’t as leisurely as lightly tugging a hosepipe on a warm summer’s evening, and choices had to be made last summer when the heatwave made plants parched and water precious.
As for the intrusive kitchen bin, it has been sweetly returned, in time for my month-long visit here, to its spot beside the chipped kitchen sink, one of many remnants from my great-grandparents’ days here, when he was the village mayor for 25 years, and only staff crossed the kitchen threshold. ‘I didn’t decide not have a bin,’ Maman explains. ‘It came naturally that there was no need for one. But I do throw away a small plastic bag of irrecuperables now and then. I find use for everything but plastics and avoid buying stuff packaged in it. I have learned to recycle every damn thing.’
Eggshells are dried, crushed and used to deter slugs. Stale bread is made into croutons, bread pudding or given to the farm for chickenfeed. Chicken bones are made into stock, then thrown far off in the garden so rats don’t lurk. ‘By the time the bones have been boiled several times, there isn’t much left on them anyway,’ she explains of her resourceful habits. ‘Old sponges can be used for cleaning for a while and toothbrushes are precious for cleaning in corners, or else the cast iron oven. Soups and pies are a way to dispose of abandoned cooked food. I used to recycle corks at the library but this has stopped alas. I’m especially happy when I stop dirty nappies being left here and have been known to open car boots to relocate bags of them.’
The Wwoofers stopped coming in 2019, when ‘some guy, who sent me a list of his favourite drinks before he arrived - Sancerre wine, port and Champagne - got me chucked out of Wwoof because I wouldn’t send a taxi to collect him and another Wwoofer, a girl he was trying to impress, after one of their bicycles got a puncture three miles away on a summer evening.’ By then anyway, Maman was 77 and had tired of welcoming and guiding all and sundry, and providing three meals a day.
She continues, however, to invite artists on residencies as she has for almost thirty years. This year it is the turn of Jennie Pedley, a former NHS health professional and founder of Edible East, which brings together artists, researchers and food growers. At the chateau, she plans to base her work around the kitchen garden, which she will start by photographing and filming at ground level, capturing the creatures that inhabit it.
As we sign off, Maman remembers that it is her first Saturday in London for a while.
‘Market first thing in the morning with Oeufs Florentine,’ she tells me, relishing the prospect of a dish non-existent in Picardy. ‘That means spinach to you.’
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