Garden fashions in France

I've just got back to Paris after spending the day at the International Festival of Gardens at Chaumont-sur-loire, about two hours out of the city by train. This contemporary garden design festival is staged all summer long in the immaculate grounds of Chaumont Chateau, overlooking the Loire Valley. Last year when I was there, the festival was evacuated after a dramatic electrical storm hit - I've never seen such spectacular lighting - but this year the weather gods smiled and turned on a 30+ scorcher. Nothing like a sunburnt nose and shoulders to mark you out as a tourist in the European summer!
For this year's festival, the theme was "community" and all of the gardens had an underlying concept of sharing - be it knowledge, produce from the garden, or simply providing a place for friends and family to meet. At least, that's the theory. But sometimes it gets lost in the execution, because Chaumont excels at the conceptual end of landscape design (ie, most gardeners don't get it, even when it's translated into English!)
You won't see picture-perfect Chelsea-style show gardens at Chaumont, but there are always a few natty ideas worth nicking. I think, however, that I'll keep my pickles in the pantry, rather than preserving them in my garden walls! This garden (pictured) was designed as a "homage to the preserves of our grandparents". The earth walls enclosing its courtyard spaces were inset with more than 200 jars of preserved vegetables, each made to an old family recipe. Only problem is, they're fermenting badly in the sun... I suppose it's also playing homage to the art of preserving, and the skill it takes to ensure your chutneys and pickles don't end up bottling botulism as well. Funnily enough, when I sat down to lunch in the festival's restaurant, they had a beautiful jar of pickles on display with their cheese platters. But when the waitress opened it, it fizzed like a can of coke. Oops. Said jar of pickles quickly developed a sense of community with the rubbish bin.
Still on the subject of rubbish, garden shows create a lot of leftover waste: compost, unneeded plants, bits of concrete, cut paving slabs etc. So one of the designers exhibiting at Chaumont this year picked up every piece of rubbish created by all the other designers and used this as the material for his display. I'd love to say that it looked amazingly artistic, but actually it just looked like a pile of rubbish. Or perhaps the craft table at your local kindergarten.
In another garden, the designer used wire gabion baskets (normally filled with stones and used to prevent banks eroding along motorways) to prop up a long outdoor kitchen bench. Instead of the stones, however, they were filled with recycled aluminium cans. And all the plants were labelled with metal lids from jam jars (pictured) that had been painted pale green on the inside and were threaded over curly wire stakes. Very cute. Mind you, I'd need to eat a lot of jam to label all the plants in my vege patch!
Firewood stacks are peculiarly fashionable (who would have thought?) it seems too. Not only were they used as "bug hotels" at the Hampton Court Show, at Chaumont they were stacked neatly into courtyard walls. I wonder why wood looks so cool in big heaps - perhaps it appeals on a subconscious level to our inner cave dweller... I don't know but I don't even have a wood-burning fire at home and I'm yearning for a woodpile now.
Or perhaps I'll finally get around to pruning my tangled mess of a plum tree this year, simply to harvest enough branches to make my own versions of these eco-friendly wooden roller blinds (pictured). This garden was pretty funky - not only were the branches hung as blinds, they were also used as hammocks, shade sails and, when the ends were rolled up and packed out with hessian and potting mix, planter boxes for flowering annuals. Better than trellis for privacy in a courtyard too. Mental note to self: get out the pruning saw before winter's over.