Champetre: A love affair with color and French light. When I first started this run of French country-infused writing, declaring that “Champêtre: a French Field Guide” would be my leitmotif for the next year or so, I browsed through some of my favorite French paintings that influenced my early life as an art student—those Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, les Fauvists, les Nabi, and other early 20th-century French painters. Over and over, I fell in love with the colorful canvases by that lively gang of turn-of-the-century dandies—Matisse, Vuillard, and Bonnard—initially for their glowing and colorful interiors and still lives, and then for their bright and colorful gardens, often seen from inside their windows—painted shutters flung open to the French light. From inside my own windowscapes at Camont, this year’s exuberant tulip crop started jumping out of the crowded pots as the warmer spring weather beckoned me outside to dig and plant. I buried small hard anemone corms close to the terrace to pop up with their purple, dark pink, and red blossoms. I sowed the tiniest seeds in egg cartons and yogurt pots to germinate inside the kitchen window. I had to stop resisting the wild urge to throw myself into full-on Jardinière mode. Yes, I would shop and cook, write and photograph, but first I needed to design, plant, and nurture a new front garden by my renovated barn and its front door Paradis terrace. But where to start? How would I describe my heart's garden desire? I looked back at the first words I wrote about Champetre here and let that lead the way. “Champêtre” is where I will cross-pollinate all my French lessons: cooking, gardening, restoring, decorating, photography, painting, and especially writing— under one pastoral and rustic tiled roof.” Garden like a Painter Mon Jardin Sauvage After watching this brief video on Bonnard’s garden above, look at the colorful painting below by Pierre Bonnard. It’s quite simply titled “Garden.” I have referred to Pierre Bonnard’s earlier life and work here, as a Post-Impressionist painter and printer, one of Les Nabis group, and a transitional figure to Modernism. But I hadn’t thought much about his role as a gardener as well as a painter until I came across this video about him and Monet, who were neighbors living just a few kilometers apart in Normandy. “He preferred the thick clumps of vegetation, unkempt grasses and baroque flowerings of his ‘wild garden’ in Normandy to the flower beds that his friend Monet grew in Giverny, which were organised like the paint on a palette.” Isabelle Cahn, “Pierre Bonnard, Gardens” 2015, Éditions des Falaises. So, I sat with my coffee this morning and thought about how I would garden as a painter rather than a Giverny gardener. Bonnard’s wild garden resonated with me, not just in the sense of letting things “go to seed” or for the protection of pollinators, but also from a purely visual perspective. If I scrunch my eyes, do I see the splotches of deep fuchsia geranium flowers like brush strokes against the chaos of greens, bright acid to deep forest oak leaf? Maybe you have never been to the south of France in the spring, but you don’t need to if the colors of Bonnard’s “Garden” painting allow you to connect the implied dots as French blossoms—tulips, irises, silver-leafed lamb’s ears growing between two crab apple trees. So many years ago, two artist friends on board my barge proclaimed, “Oh, now I get it! Those aren’t brush strokes of yellow paint on Monet’s paintings; they are fallen poplar leaves on the canal.” I think of them each fall. The reality of the falling leaves is only important in the context of the season. The small, bright daubs of cadmium yellow paint let us fill in the blanks as we bring the landscape or garden to life in our minds. You can read more about this in John Berger’s “Selected Essays—The Eyes of Claude Monet.” Gardening outside the lines If I look at my farmhouse garden at Camont as art, as a late Impressionist gardener rather than a mid-1800s Realist, I begin to feel the stirrings of something long ago buried as a young art student. I want to be this “Nabi de la Terre”, more modern in my works as I become a modern elder. While I am still influenced by the tight 19th-century Japanese prints I love, then and now, my focus today is less on one element at a time, one season at a time. Rather, time compresses into a playbook of all the previous springs, all the memorable autumns of falling leaves onto that ever-flowing canal. While I still pay attention to the individual elements of my garden, I am looser with my planting strokes, less precise, more reckless and wild as I reach outside the edges and boundaries. Now, I throw flower seeds, starburst orange cosmos and apron-blue nigella, among the clumping bushes as well as in the flower beds. I will plant and fill the kitchen hillside with splashes of color, much like Bonnard's paintings. “Garden like a painter” is not just about producing lovely paintings, but is an expression of how we could live our most artful days later in life. I have a sloping grassy patch from the jammy Muscat vine fence on the roadside down to the Keeping Kitchen terrace where my salad greens thrive. We had to cut down two older quince and an apple tree that caught some “fungus thing” at the end of last year, leaving two pretty crabapple trees to flower in memory. I have been getting used to seeing that bare grassy open space over the winter and wondering what to do with it, until now. When I saw Bonnard’s wonderful, bright green background framed by two fruit trees in the “Garden,” I started my journey down this particular rabbit hole. Now, I don’t want a landscaped border garden. Instead, I want a painter's vision of splashes of bright colors, hot pink and orange cosmos and zinnias, purple anemones and bronze irises crowding through the grass and letting this year's wonderful tulips poke through next spring. Those driving by Camont will see a blur of color dots and patches of green. I shared my idea of “painting the garden” with Allison Makgill, my garden angel. She and her husband, experienced tree surgeon Trevor, help me tend the acre-plus of wild and not-so-wild garden/lawn/potager/orchard/park at Camont. They do all the heavy lifting; I look and point, and spout slightly absurd ideas and take the credit. Now, they are used to me. And as friends and neighbors, we share in each other’s successes—farm fresh eggs from their hens, hydrangea and rose clippings from my mature bushes. I breathed an audible sigh of relief when I showed Allison the Bonnard painting on my phone, and she didn’t even roll her eyes! So I turned around the Relais this morning, the sun kept playing hide and seek. I saw other new patches of color—the yellow flag against a backdrop of quivering poplar trees and acid green willow curtains. The acacia tree near the terrace table just exploded today with fragrant white bunches of blossoms threaded through its spindly branches by an old rose—Blush Noisette. I spotted a solitary bronze iris under the now spent cherry trees; the composting pink petals must have fed the iris and honeysuckle that grow there. I looked at the photograph I took and imagined a more painterly version in front of the rustic garden gate, once painted woad blue, a million years ago. “Bonnard did not paint from life but rather drew his subject—sometimes photographing it as well—and made notes on the colors. He then painted the canvas in his studio from his notes. "I have all my subjects to hand," he said, "I go back and look at them. I take notes. Then I go home. And before I start painting I reflect, I dream."[1] Do I write like a gardener or dream like a painter? And this is where that idea rattled my old bones and injected a dose of new energy into a flagging spirit. If I could imagine a new way of gardening after decades of “plan, plant, and prune,” “clip, deadhead, repeat,” could I not apply this same re-wilding spirit to my writing? What if I oversowed the predictable blog posts and 1200-word essays, letting the lyrical notes and small French vignettes drift up through the pages of weekly recipes and market porn? What if I let go of the planned rows of orderly paragraphs and clear outlines and let the words drift across untended pastures, full of wild orchid promises? Could I harvest a new yet-to-be-written book, so long mired in publishing fears and questions? (Who will buy it? Who will sell it? Do I have enough social media?) What if the words reflected this slower living, taking the time to hold a dying bird, a song thrush, and bury it under the roses? Are these words enough to spur you to continue to read? Yes, maybe, not every time, but often enough to keep you coming back. The writer in the garden Here I am at the end of the sunniest days of April, warmth pushing between the banana leaves and highlighting the palm tree flowers that grow incongruously in a French farmhouse garden. I agree that they do indeed look like pale yellow fish roe, Raquel. I wonder if they are edible, too? Finding one’s voice as a writer, an artist, a photographer, or any other human is less an exercise in filling notebooks and journals, but more about living each day fully and as it presents itself—fractured, in pieces, broken by shards of light that are the glory moments remembered forever. * Come into my garden and my kitchen. * Sit on my sofa, read, and bunch the pretty pillows under your book. * Take a walk along my towpath, through my markets, and meet my friends who grow the food I cook and eat. * Without a plan. Without an outline. * Come live a day in the small villages and rolling countryside that defines what Champêtre embodies—a way of living with the seasons, minute by minute, of each special day. Isn’t that just enough? * As I live it d
