“I’VE ADDED 150 DROUGHT-RESILIENT PLANTS THIS YEAR, THEIR DIVERSE ARCHITECTURE DESIGNED TO COMPLEMENT THE CLOUDY BACKDROP”
THIS stylistic garden bears all the hallmarks of a free-flowing, naturalistic Provençal garden; a tapestry of tough shrubs, flowering perennials, indigenous fruiting trees, windbreak and decorative cypresses beneath towering umbrella pines. Aside from aesthetics, it is remarkable on two further counts; the owners’ thirst for plant diversity and the conflicting and challenging presence of water.
Specialist dry garden designer James Basson, ‘half brought up in the south of France’, was the obvious choice to, which lay beyond the driveway, in sight of the house. The brief was to include, ‘somewhere lovely to look out on to and to be able to walk through an atmospheric space spilling with scent, textures and colour. A garden which fits in beautifully with the landscape (low-lying rocky outcrops) not too violent on colour, somewhere I would want to work in the garden myself ’. The property sits in the agricultural flood plain of the Alpilles massif, ‘the water table sits just two metres below the garden’ – this was a first for James – ‘the soil is relatively rich, and both are counter-intuitive to a typical dry garden’. This unexpected issue was resolved ‘by making a slight change in relief and texture. The soil was raised by 20-30cm, by incorporating lots of gravel and top-dressed with 10cm more gravel. The network of mineral-lined pathways which wind through the planting mounds, created walkways, also acting as drainage channels. Potentially a good model for drought-tolerant planting in UK gardens’.
