The Artistic Garden Monty Don's French Gardens

What images does France conjure up for you?

Now, for me, there are beautiful houses and gardens of all kinds,

but also glorious markets, street cafes,

and some very formative experiences.

When I was 19, I came to the south of France

and lived in Aix-en-Provence for six months.

And ever since then, I've loved France and everything to do with it.

And I want to share that passion for the country with you,

through its gardens.

'I'll be travelling the byways of the French countryside...'

This is what the Deux Chevaux was made for.

'..meeting local gardeners...'

Bonjour, je m'appelle Monty.

Bonjour.

'..tasting the very best of their harvest...'

Sometimes this job is really good.

'..getting to turn on huge fountains...'

I can hear the water.

'..and trying to find out what makes French gardens,

'and, indeed, the French, unique.'

Today, I shall be looking both at the gardens of artists,

and gardens that are works of art in their own right.

I'll be visiting gardens portrayed by painters like Claude Monet

and Paul Cezanne, as well as the work

of France's most interesting contemporary designers.

And I'll be trying to find out at what point the French think that

a garden transcends horticulture and becomes a work of art.

This is Cafe Nemours in the heart of Paris,

just round the corner from the Louvre.

Un kir, s'il vous plait.

Merci.

Paris has always attracted artists and intellectuals.

I remember my grandfather, who died 30 years ago when he was nearly 100,

telling me how he lived and worked in Paris in 1901,

and that it was a very sexy, free city where

they did the can-can, and there was the Moulin Rouge.

Paris was somewhere that was sophisticated,

where art was respected and was very creative.

So, just to come and sit and watch street life go by was more

exciting than anything else you'd get in Britain.

Still is.

That sense of creative freedom can perhaps be dated back to

the exhibition at the Louvre in 1863 which included,

for the first time, the early work of a radical group of artists

now known as the Impressionists.

Painting directly from nature, painters like Paul Cezanne

and Claude Monet embraced light and colour as their central themes,

attempting to capture the essence of a single moment in their canvases.

And gardens, nature at its most domestic and accessible,

were to be a common subject of their paintings.

A series of the most famous of all impressionist

paintings are displayed here in the Orangerie in the Tuileries gardens.

They are the eight Nympheas,

Monet's canvases of water lilies,

inspired by the water garden he created and then painted again,

and again.

Of course, the really overwhelming thing is the scale.

These are simply enormous paintings.

They're bigger than most ponds.

The scale is celestial.

What's really interesting is that these have become almost

completely abstract.

It's as though Monet has immersed himself so closely

and nearly with what he's painting, and I see him standing right

close to the canvas, that he's not really painting the garden any more.

He's painting what the garden means, he's painting light

and colour and the fact that it's water, it's bouncing off

and it's becoming abstract and metaphysical

and that's beautiful.

That's inspiring.

He's taken the garden and gone beyond.

To find out more about Monet's paintings,

I want to go to the source of his inspiration,

so I'm leaving Paris and going northwest to visit his garden

in Normandy, that he made in a small village on the banks of the Seine.

This is Giverny, the garden of Claude Monet

and it's a garden I know,

I've been here twice before, but never before in April.

Monet found this old cider farm in the village of Giverny

in the spring of 1883 when he was looking for a home

to rent for his young and growing family.

At the age of 43, he was already an experienced gardener and he was

to spend the remaining 43 years of his life obsessed by this garden.

As soon as he moved in,

he set to work transforming the orchard in front of the farmhouse.

The first thing that strikes me is how fresh everything is.

When I came here the first time it was high summer and, actually,

it was surprisingly...not drab, that's the wrong word,

but it was overwhelmed with foliage and in between colour phases.

And then when I came here in late spring,

the colour was incredibly intense.

But now there's a lightness

and almost... the colours dance above the borders.

It's lovely.

Monet laid the garden out in blocks of colour

like an artist's palette, mixing simple flowers like daisies

and poppies with more unusual varieties like the species tulips.

In fact, he grew increasingly particular about the exact varieties

that would give him the texture and colour that he wanted to paint.

He once said, "I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers."

In the process of making the garden, he transformed the site.

But he didn't always get his own way.

This central alley was flanked, when he came here, with trees.

There were fir trees and yew trees.

Now he cut some down,

and put up these arches on the site of where the trees were.

But his wife Alice wouldn't let him cut down the fir trees that were

there, although they were clearly pretty horrid and inappropriate.

So he kept them, and then he obviously worked on her for a bit

because he was allowed to cut all off except for the trunks,

which looks really odd.

They look like fat telegraph poles and he grew roses up them.

But then, when she died,

with a sort of due period of mourning

for tree and wife, he came out and he cut them down.

Monet began painting this part of the garden, called the Clos Normand,

as soon as he moved in and continued to do so for the rest of his life.

He kept to a strict daily routine, rising at dawn

and going outside to catch the light.

And unlike the hordes of tourists, all trying to snap the whole

essence of the garden in one killer shot, this meant that he

often worked, systematically, on a number of canvases simultaneously,

moving from one to the other, around the garden, as the light changed.

To maintain the right intensity of colour,

he thought nothing of ripping out hundreds of flowers and

replacing them almost daily, which is how the garden is still run.

James Priest is the English head gardener,

whose job it is to maintain Monet's legacy.

One of the things I'm interested in

is the relationship between artist and gardens.

What do you think about that?

I think it's a very good parallel.

The artist is working obviously on canvas, working both with

a picture to make and...our tools are plants,

whereas the artist's using paint,

but we're making something according to what theme,

artists have different movements, gardens have different styles.

So we decide on the style we want and we're trying to make

something most beautiful, harmonious and true to a feeling,

because an artist doesn't... an artist, to my mind,

doesn't just make something that's real and cold,

he makes something that has depth to it and feeling and emotion to it.

So I think the parallel is very, very close.

Monet had to know his colours, and how to mix them and how to use them.

I have to know my flowers and the colours and how to use them.

So, technically, two different techniques,

but the final result is very comparable.

Do you think Monet was a good gardener, or not?

I think at the end of his life he was a good gardener.

I think at the beginning of his life, like all of us,

he had to learn what gardening was about,

and so he started very simply.

It took time.

It took time, it took all his life, yes.

Today, over 600,000 people a year come

to appreciate Monet, the gardener.

Ten years after he first moved to Giverny, Monet sold enough paintings

to enable him not only to buy the house in Clos Normand, but also

a plot of land over the road,

to begin to make his famous water garden.

The water lilies are not yet in flower.

I shall make a return visit to see them later in the summer.

I'm now going south on the TGV to visit a very different garden

which was also the inspiration for a painter that I love.

He was a contemporary and friend of Monet's, called Paul Cezanne.

This means retracing the steps of my much younger self.

Back then, the journey from Paris to Marseilles took all night.

Now it's a mere three hours.

The last time I made this journey by train was 1974.

I was 19, and looking for light, really.

I'd become entranced by the paintings of Paul Cezanne

and the way that he used light and landscape,

and I was completely besotted by the idea of this bright, strong

light, filtered through landscape and through trees, because by then

I was gardening a lot and I felt some deep, emotional attraction

to growth and soil and landscape and I painted a little bit.

And to see it all come together was thrilling.

So down I came. And it was a big adventure.

I still have my journal from those days and it records

the excitement and wonder I felt on my first visit

in the light of the south.

Sunday, 13th October 1974, I woke at seven to find myself

in broad Provencal sunshine with the train at Arles.

I spent the rest of the journey gazing at Provence.

Misty blue mountains, blue sparkling sea, white gleaming rock,

olive trees, cypress, firs, so beautiful.

Here's me, at 19, proudly showing my new beret.

I'd obviously just bought that.

I change trains and travel on to Aix-en-Provence.

When I get there, I go straight back to visit some old haunts.

This is Rue Portalis, where I lived when I was in Aix,

and it was there, number 20, and I was up on the second floor.

The market is still here in the square at the end of the street.

I would come here and scavenge the leftovers, which were nicer

than anything I'd get in Britain.

This is a mobilette.

I had one similar to it, not actually quite as good,

because this is a Solex where the engine is in front.

Mine was underneath.

But this curious hybrid of bicycle and motorbike,

that were really common 30, 40 years ago -

you hardly ever see them now.

But I would set off, bravely, tearing along at 20 miles an hour,

and if things got a bit dodgy or you ran out of fuel, you could pedal.

The main reason I was here was to get closer to the paintings

that so inspired me.

Paul Cezanne was born in Aix in 1839 and he lived here most of his life.

He painted the area ceaselessly, distilling

the essence of the landscape and the southern light onto canvas.

Cezanne lived in his parental home, Jas de Bouffan,

and painted the garden in every season.

Back in the 1970s, I thought that if I went to see the garden,

it would teach me something about Cezanne's paintings,

but it didn't prove to be that easy.

I wanted to find Jas de Bouffan, which I knew was where

Cezanne was brought up, where he lived most of his life, actually.

And I thought, maybe, that I could go in and walk around.

But anyway it was no use, because the gates were firmly locked,

and it seemed to be very closed down, it was scruffy,

there was no sign of life, no-one going in or out,

so I hung around for a bit and went away again.

Anyway, I now know that I can go in, nearly 40 years later,

and at last have a look round.

The garden is very simple.

It isn't filled with flowers like Giverny,

but Cezanne loved to paint the lines of the trees and the light

and the shade filtering through the branches.

And all the features that are so recognisable from his paintings

are still here -

the plane trees,

the pool,

and the rather grand house itself.

In fact, it seems almost untouched since he lived here.

I've got some postcards of Jas de Bouffan...

I want to match them up and see.

It is a very imposing house.

That sort of thing, look, there's the house, that's good.

Actually, looking at that, I've got another postcard,

if you look at that, that postcard there...

is that.

And there's the pond, look.

There's the pond, the corner of the pond which is there,

there's the path, much narrower, and there are the avenues,

exactly there.

So he's standing here and painting that.

And in fact, even that little bit there...

is this here.

It's that.

That's good.

You see, what's exciting about that

is that it's not just identifying it.

For me, a garden is home, it's life, it's childhood memory,

dreams, all bound up.

You can't separate it.

So where Cezanne walked in the garden,

let alone painted in the garden, connects you to him in a way...

It means you smell the same smells,

you hear the same things.

He would have heard the water trickling.

And I think that's just thrilling, I think that's really living,

breathing history in a way that just a postcard can't do.

When Cezanne was 60, his mother died and the house

and garden had to be sold.

Cezanne built himself a small studio

and garden a couple of miles away, on the other side of Aix.

It is very lovely.

It's one's idea of a villa in the middle of a hot day

and he built it to live in, but he never did.

He then transformed it into a studio and came up here to work

every day, and he made a garden from what was farmland.

Actually, the garden isn't much to look at now, and apparently

it never was, it wasn't important to him

in a horticultural sense, but what he loved and painted a lot

were the lines and shapes of stems and branches

and the light and colour filtering through.

So it mattered to him,

and also having that sort of safety zone around him.

This was absolutely his space and clearly fired his creativity.

Now it's sort of been let go, and it's interesting.

If this was England, and this was National Trust,

it would be fully restored to exactly the date

when Cezanne made it,

but I rather like the way that it's become itself,

and I rather suspect Cezanne would have liked it, too.

The garden may have been allowed to grow wild,

but the studio is beautifully preserved,

and it does feel as though Cezanne has just walked out of the room.

This is a letter to Monet, dated 6th July, 1895.

It's been said of Cezanne

that he painted still lifes like landscapes,

and landscapes like still lifes.

And yet he was one of the first people to paint still lifes

as though he'd just caught them,

as though he'd just got their essence before it drifted away.

And that has a spiritual quality and it's incredibly beautiful.

And in a way, it's not fanciful to compare that to gardening -

when you're making a garden, or even just enjoying a garden,

there is that profound sense of just being in the moment

and you share it and you know it will change, the weather will

change, the plant will move on and it'll never be the same again.

But just for a second, you were precisely there,

and that's what Cezanne's paintings immediately gave me,

and have given lots of other people.

I may have had to wait 40 years to come and see his home gardens,

but it's certainly increased my understanding of Cezanne's work.

By coming and walking through his garden and looking at it

and letting the light fall and just sitting in it quietly,

I've realised something very profoundly that I hadn't quite

got from looking at the pictures,

which is that it's ordinary.

It's just like lots of other people's gardens.

Bigger than most, but the content's the same.

Nothing special here at all.

And what, of course, Cezanne did was take those ordinary elements

and utterly transform them.

Through genius, he made the private and the domestic, the back garden,

into something that everybody in the world realises as truly great art.

Cezanne didn't need to create a garden for it to inspire his art.

But the next garden I want to show you was self-consciously

made as a work of art in itself.

To get there, I am reunited with my favourite French car,

but I can't resist just revisiting a scene

that Cezanne painted many times.

Driving a 2CV on a twisty, windy Provencal road...

on the wrong side of the road, is slightly alarming.

There we go.

When I was here as a teenager,

I worked in the gardens just outside Aix.

I loved the journey there,

because the road took me past the spot where Cezanne repeatedly

set up his easel to paint the great outcrop, Mont Sainte-Victoire.

Oh look, there's Mont Sainte-Victoire.

A hell of a view.

That still thrills me. All this time, I've seen it lots of times

and it's still thrilling.

You can imagine what it was like as a 19-year-old.

It's as exciting now as it was then.

Every time I saw it, I was in the painting.

I was here, in the place where the painting was,

and that was such a buzz.

Cezanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire over 80 times,

and through his paintings, one can chart his move towards abstraction.

By the time he died in 1906,

he was increasingly using blocks of colour to build semi-abstract forms.

This later work of Cezanne helped inspire a radical new art

movement - cubism.

I've come 65 miles to the Riviera town of Hyeres to see

the world's first cubist garden.

I couldn't get any breakfast at the hotel

and although it's great being able to get in early

and see the garden, I've got to have some coffee before I start.

I can't think.

The central idea of cubism

is to show a subject from several perspectives at the same time.

And it revolutionised the world of art and architecture.

The garden I'm heading off to see at this time of day

is called Villa Noailles and it was made in the 1920s

as the first truly modern garden in France,

because it's a cubist garden and was deliberately made, really,

as a continuation of the paintings that the cubists did,

and the sculptures.

So it's part garden, part work of art.

What I don't know is if it's still maintained as it was,

if it has retained that sense of shocking, new, experimental art.

I'll find out when I've had a cup of coffee.

In 1927, Charles and Marie Laure de Noailles,

aristocratic and hugely wealthy patrons of modern art,

decided to build a holiday villa, complete with a cubist garden.

What was unusual, even groundbreaking,

was that they commissioned the designer, Gabriel Guevrekian,

to make the garden expressly as a work of art.

I was quite worried before coming to see this because,

although I've seen lots of pictures, it looked a bit scruffy

and I couldn't quite see how it would work as a garden.

But it does, and it's a relief, because it's all sorts of things,

it's charming, it's a piece of history

and it's definitely a piece of art.

It was originally planted with tulips and standard citrus,

but from the outset, the plants were always secondary to the planes

and shapes of Guevrekian's design.

It is as though he has taken recognisable elements of the garden,

like a gravel path, and reassembled them

in different dimensions to create his work.

It's very nice once you're inside it. It's very different,

actually, because all the different levels are really working.

And although there are no paths, it actually feels reasonable to go,

you feel like a chess piece on a chessboard.

My move.

And it's a very friendly space, I suppose,

which is not a word you'd associate, really, with cubism.

But it works.

I like the way with cubism that, although there are no paths,

the paths that there are, the gravel, is at an angle at the wall.

So your eye is saying, "path," and yet it's not doing it.

All part of that cubist mentality of trying to unpick

the world and put it back together again in a jumble that makes

you see it with fresh eyes.

It makes the garden look fresher.

When it was made, 85 years ago, this garden was revolutionary

and challenged all perceptions of what a garden was, or might be.

The De Noailles kept open house for artists and intellectuals,

making Villa Noailles, for a while, the most fashionable artistic

centre in the whole of France.

Pierre Quillet's grandfather was the butler here during that period.

If the planting hasn't stood the test of time,

the structure of the garden certainly has.

And it's still provocative and interesting.

60 miles north of Hyeres is another garden which has been bought

and sold as a collector's item.

Its every detail was created in direct artistic response

to the landscape that surrounds it.

There's something I want to see on the way.

I'm going to make a little detour

because I've heard that there's a lavender field down here.

I want to see lavender growing in its natural habitat, so to speak.

Look at that!

The thing about lavender grown here is that it's got exactly

the conditions it wants.

You've got this very dry limestone soil, look at that,

it's just powder in my hand.

And look how healthy it is.

It's completely found where it wants to be.

And when I do that, I'm surprised you can't see the air shimmer

with scent, it's so rich and oily and quite heady,

it's almost intoxicating!

And what lavender loves is harsh, extreme conditions

and really good drainage.

But it's surprising that there are cherries.

I mean, cherries we think of as garden of England cherries,

but they love it here.

It just shows you what they really like.

Hmm...

not quite ripe, but lovely.

That one looks better.

Standing in Provencal sunshine, next to a lavender field,

eating cherries.

That's quite good.

The garden I'm heading for is called La Louve.

It's set in some of the most beautiful

countryside in the south of France.

It's up there, somewhere.

I'll find it.

It's in the village of Bonnieux, in the heart of the Luberon,

in Provence.

I'm coming here to see it as a work of art,

but it has also set the standard as the dream Provencal garden.

Good morning, bonjour.

The garden is modest in size,

set on a steep slope in the middle of the village.

It was made by Nicole de Vesian,

a successful textile designer, using a style that is deceptively

simple, based around native plants and natural materials.

I love the way that this garden picks up the rhythm of the place.

It does it in a number of ways. The obvious ones are in the outlines

and the shapes that follow the landscape.

And that's very subtle, it shows that Nicole really looked

and really observed.

And didn't copy, but just picked up on that flow

and let it run through the garden.

Nicole didn't base her garden on any rare or unusual plants.

These cypresses are native to the region and lavender,

of course, loves it here.

It's not what she used, but how she used it -

the artistry she employed that makes La Louve so special.

At every turn, there's a perfectly composed still life.

Despite the very awkward site,

La Louve works both as a lovely garden and as a work of art.

And whilst it seems deceptively simple, it is,

in fact, edited in every detail.

This garden is a really good example

of how to make a small space seem bigger.

And it does it by two ways.

One is by filling it.

And the other is by compressing space.

The easiest way to do that is by having your walkways

and your entrances and exits really narrow

and by compressing them down,

so you have to sort of squidge through, almost,

and brush against the foliage, which is lovely,

because there's a really good scent. It pushes space in

and then as you come out the other side, it releases it

and makes it seem much bigger.

And you'd be surprised how that works every time.

At the age of 80, 10 years after starting La Louve,

Nicole decided to sell her garden

because she wanted to make a new one.

The art collector, Judith Pillsbury, was the buyer,

and she purchased it as a finished work of art.

It was just a coup de foudre, it was just so beautiful,

it was like being able to buy Sissinghurst.

When one is buying into, literally and figuratively,

into a garden that's very established,

are you obliged to curate it?

Well, I think one is obliged to curate it, that's what I feel,

and I'm an art dealer, so I'm used to taking care of works of art.

The idea of the artist creating their art through

the medium of horticulture is one that interests me a lot.

Do you think that it's practical, that one can do that?

I don't know that Nicole started out that way.

I think that she was someone who just couldn't stop creating

and she had a vision of Provence, which at that time was very new.

I mean, she embraced the vernacular of a peasant garden,

not very many plants.

She embraced that and she turned that into something

that was a positive.

Nicole Vesian died 20 years ago.

But her style of Provencal garden has become increasingly influential.

Although she made a world famous garden, the irony is that

Nicole de Vesian was, conventionally, no gardener.

She didn't dig the garden at all,

there was no attempt to return fertility, she didn't make compost.

She planted much too close together.

But she had an absolutely innate feel for two things.

One was colour and the other was form.

The colours she's used here are very muted and faded

and they look terrific under a very bright sun.

They have a kind of richness and subtle intensity,

whereas if you use them under grey skies, that just looks drab.

And the other thing that she just had a superb feel for was space,

it's a sculptural quality, and her clipping and training,

it wasn't just to do with organising the plants themselves,

but the space between plants, the space

between branches, that captures light and the distant horizon.

It's just exquisite. And that's gardening of real high quality.

She may not have known how to grow the plants or even their names,

but she sure knew how to make them look good.

I left here, wondering whether you can make a garden,

or indeed a work of art, by accident.

Can one drift into the other?

Or must you set out with a clear purpose and vision?

To try and answer this, I've decided to look to the present

and ask three of France's contemporary designers what

they think the relationship is between their gardens and art.

One uses his plants as living sculpture.

Another takes the elements of the traditional French formal

gardens and re-invents them to elegant effect.

And the third creates gardens

that climb vertically on the walls of inner city buildings.

This one's on the Quaie Branly in Paris.

But Patrick Blanc's work is now found all over the world,

commissioned and displayed like paintings,

neatly bridging the gap between gardens and art.

I've come to see Patrick at his seemingly ordinary

home in the south of Paris.

Hello, Patrick.

Hello.

I'm Monty. Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you.

'But inside it's anything but ordinary...'

Ah, I can see this...

bit at the end.

My goodness.

It's a kind of tropical forest at home!

'..because Patrick has his own indoor vertical garden...'

Oh, now it's a little bit more than three years old.

'Or as he calls it, a "mur vegetal," a wall of plants.'

It's three years old?

Yes, and each plant has its own place

because there are about 250 species...

-250 species here?

-Yes!

Oooh!

Despite his growing fame as an artistic gardener,

Patrick is first and foremost an academic botanist with

an obsession for plants from tropical rainforests.

And as rainforests account for over half the plant species

on the planet, they're a rich source of material for his living wall.

Tell me, technically, how do you fix them in?

How, what are they growing in?

So they don't need any nutrients?

No. When you have, for instance, limestone cliffs,

you have everywhere in the world

and you see many species are growing as soon as

there is some circulation of water.

The only important thing is to choose the species, which in nature

are always growing on vertical or very oblique surfaces.

And how do you keep it watered?

Oh, it's very easy. On the top you have a hose with some holes.

-So to water, you have a hose and it drips down?

-Yes.

Inside this perfectly ordinary Parisian home,

Patrick has created his own miniature ecosystem, complete

with lizards,

birds,

and even an underfloor aquarium.

Yet although this is quite unlike most gardens,

the plants are still adapting and growing where it most suits them.

In the case of a vertical garden,

you see the plant can escape much more. You see this ficus,

ficus villosa, for instance, which is here,

I planted it here, I didn't know it wanted to climb,

but now it is at the top

and I think maybe it will be covering the ceiling.

So, you see, with vertical gardens there are many more surprises

because plants are totally free.

Is this, do you think, other people have called this a work of art,

do you think of it as your artwork?

Or do you think of it as your garden? Or both?

For me, it's my babies.

Your babies!

I like the exuberance of Patrick's living walls.

This one is also in Paris, in the Rue de la Verrerie,

and they've been much imitated around the world.

Patrick himself is clearly not concerned

whether they're art or not, but they challenge the nature of a garden

and a lot of people enjoy them as living art.

I'm now leaving Paris to head north, and the next gardener I'm going

to meet has taken on a deeply serious subject -

war and peace.

His garden has been inspired by the countryside it's set in

and its long and troubled history.

This landscape of northern France

will feel very familiar to British eyes.

It does look similar in many ways,

but the really big difference is that in this landscape,

war raged within living memory

and was the scene of horrendous fighting and terrible losses,

and the marks of that are still here,

both physically on the landscape itself, and in the community.

The name of the garden that I'm heading towards

is Sericourt, near the town of Arras.

Sericourt is the creation of Yves Gosse de Gorre, who was born

and brought up here, and identifies personally with

the history of the surrounding battle-scarred landscape.

This is what inspired him

to create this large garden from scratch.

THEY CONVERSE IN FRENCH

The 11 acre garden is

divided into many compartments, with the warrior garden at its heart.

Des soldates?

Ranks of fastigiate Irish yews,

each trimmed to an individual height, stand at the ready.

Just beyond them are crude faces clipped from cypress.

Ah, la la!

Yves loves the symbolism of plants.

But the garden also includes direct images of the brutality that

raged in this region just a few generations ago.

I never thought I'd say this, that a hole could be a beautiful thing.

Everything in this garden has a story or a symbol attached to it.

Even though Yves started as a plantsman, he is,

in a very French way,

in love with the intellectual concepts that plants can express.

But the garden's idiosyncrasies make it both very personal

and yet accessible at every level.

This is a big garden and it's full of ideas.

On every corner you turn, there's something else going on.

But what you feel like, it's a party,

the door opens and as a visitor, "Welcome in, come and join us,"

it's full of jostling, friendly humanity.

And that's pretty good for a garden.

Not many gardens achieve that.

But I think what doesn't work is, there's no discrimination,

and I think art has to leave out more than it includes.

Here, the feeling is that nothing has been left out.

The last of these modern gardens is in Normandy,

a couple of hours' drive away.

And here, all that I've learned about the French comes together in

what I consider a hugely successful artistic work, and a lovely garden.

This is Le Jardin Plume,

"the feather garden,"

made over the past 15 years.

I first came here in winter, and it was very bleak and bare,

but dramatic, and you could see what was going on,

but you had to guess quite a lot.

Now it's all evident and visible and, I guess, at its absolute best

and it's just a joy.

Everywhere you look, there's such interesting things going on.

For example, the planting goes from the very conventional

and recognisable, to really quite dramatically modern,

using grasses in ways that a lot of people would say are weeds,

and, "that's not the way you do it."

But because it's done so slickly, and so well, it just feels sharp

and utterly contemporary.

The use of grasses is now highly fashionable,

but Sylvie and Patrick Quibel, who made this garden from an open field,

have established the perfect interplay between formal

structure and the flowing sensuality of the content.

It is like beautifully cut clothes

that fit perfectly

and yet allow the fabric to move and perform.

You can walk right in amongst the planting,

and you have this incredible movement.

The wind just sort of riffles through and fingers it.

The sound. The texture.

The way that you look through something, to see everything else,

just works superbly well.

It's a really, really good example of how you work with a space,

even if it's an unlikely one, and let things go within constraints.

That makes something really special.

The underlying design of this garden is based upon longstanding

French formal gardening traditions.

Like the gardens at Versailles and Vaux le Vicomte,

but expressed in a very modern way.

So, there are grandes allees,

but they are created by mowing different heights of grass.

The hedges are tightly clipped,

but in flowing crests and waves.

There is formal water, but cut as another square into the mown grass.

I suppose the big question is -

is this garden a work of art or is it just a beautiful garden?

Certainly, it's full of very sculptural, artistic ideas

and I think that this great block of green box is wonderful.

Thrilling, even.

Now, is it a box?

Call it a hedge, call it anything you like - this is art for me.

But the real way that this works is in the mind.

It's got to be an idea, you've got to have

the concept of art as a garden and this is where the French excel.

They love concepts, they're very good at intellectualising.

Taking an idea and turning it into a garden, taking a garden

and turning it into an idea and playing with it,

and I think the gardens that we've seen here in France show that they

can do what the British, quite frankly, feel embarrassed about.

We're clumsy, intellectually, compared to them.

I think this garden is beautiful as a garden, as well as crossing

the line to become a fascinating work of art.

But did Patrick and Sylvie make it with that in mind?

The ephemeral nature of gardening

certainly does make it an elusive medium for art.

But I think that this garden achieves it,

through the combination of its deceptively simple

and pared down layout

and the way the planting's encouraged

to be so transitory and loose.

There is one final stop to make on this journey,

and it is the garden most strongly associated with art in the world,

let alone France.

It's late summer

and I've returned to Claude Monet's garden at Giverny, also in Normandy.

This time,

I'm going to see the water lilies in flower in his famous water garden.

When I came here in spring,

obviously the water lilies weren't out at all,

and it feels wrong to be in France and not come back, to not see them.

And there they are.

By 1892, ten years after he moved here,

Monet had made enough money from the sale of his paintings

to purchase more land to make a large water garden,

loosely inspired by the Japanese prints that he collected.

For the next 30 years, he was to paint it obsessively,

even as the guns

of the Western front began to rumble within earshot of Giverny.

It's funny, because I know what water lilies look like,

but I confess that my initial reaction

is one of being underwhelmed.

It's somehow less than I expected.

But actually that's unfair, it's unfair on the plants,

it's unfair on Monet and the paintings,

because it's to get it wrong.

The water lilies themselves are not important.

What Monet was painting was the light.

That's what obsessed him.

And light on water, which bounces and is reflected

and comes off at angles and shimmers

and sinks slightly beneath the water,

is endlessly fascinating.

There's no doubt that the pond, with its elusive light, entranced Monet

as well as providing an escape from the loss of his wife,

and the horror of the First World War.

Monet gave these eight huge panels

to the nation in 1918 as a celebration of the end of the war.

But he couldn't part with them, or even stop working on them

and they weren't installed here until after his death in 1926.

The paintings increase our artistic appreciation of the garden,

and visiting the garden enables us to appreciate

and understand the paintings all the more.

And Giverny seems to have given Monet an endless canvas

which he could both plant

and provide inspiration for his paintings.

I think that where gardening is special,

as opposed to all kinds of other ways of looking at the world,

is that the relationship of the gardener with the land is intimate.

It's something that is very deep

and if it taps something inside you, then it can produce great art.

And what makes French artistic gardens so particular

is the ease with which they combine intellectual abstract concepts

with an earthy love of plants.

'In this series, I've learned so much about France and its gardens,

'from how the historic grandeur of Versailles was created...'

Wow!

'..to the way that the medieval monastic tradition makes

'a modern kitchen garden.'

I hope you like the vegetables.

I love vegetables.

'From the evolving charm of Courances,

'to the Michelin-starred restaurant producing

'all its own organic produce.'

Cor, blimey, this is a muscular tomato!

'And of course, the influential formal potagers at Villandry.

'And I've seen gardens that set the standard for gardens

'of their type right across the world.'

As I've travelled round France, I've learned that they still

respect order, formality and doing things in the correct manner.

But they also take delight in abstract ideas

and intellectual concepts.

And the French have a deeply romantic streak,

running from Josephine's Malmaison,

to the crazy but wonderful modern extravaganza of Champ de Bataille.

Amazing!

And above all, their love of style, flair,

in their gardens, as in every aspect of life.

When I came to France as a teenager I was pretty sure what I wanted.

I wanted light, I wanted art,

I wanted the sort of creative impulse

that seemed to come from the south.

Obviously, now I've got older, a lot of those things have gone.

Some of them have matured and changed,

life's got complicated.

But the more I visit gardens, and travel,

it's clear that two things happen.

One, you start to piece your past together

by this new and changing present.

As you get older, things make sense, and through seeing gardens,

it's the medium with which I can measure out my world.

And also, the more that you learn about a culture

and a civilisation and a people

through the way that they make gardens,

the more that you learn about yourself.

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