Nicole de Vésian’s La Louve:

A living tapestry of textures, shapes, scents and stones.

PHOTOS BY CLIVE NICHOLS

Trading in haute couture for horticulture, Nicole de Vésian, the retired fashion stylist at House of Hermes, spent the last ten years of her life dressing this landscape with her signature sense of style, creating an iconic Provencal garden of textures, shapes, scents and stones, without flowers.

Her garden tapestry of three dimensional shapes on hillside terraces in the village of Bonnieux has been called her greatest design achievement.

I first read about this horticultural tour de force in The Secret Gardens of France, Mirabel Osler’s 1993 account of her journey through the French countryside. In the final chapter entitled Stone, Lavender and a Love of Spheres, Osler recounts a visit to La Louve (The She-Wolf), where she writes, “For Nicole, a compulsion to pare is at the heart of all her gardening.”

Almost every plant in this living tapestry — rosemary, box, santolina, sage, lavender and teucrium — has been shaped by hand, many painstakingly attended to by Madame de Vésian with a nail scissors. The garden evokes a Japanese style, with more pebbles, stones and rocks than flowers. “I have a passion for stones. You know, I bought this place because first I wanted to buy the stones. The more stones poured out, the more I wanted it.”

Shortly before Nicole’s passing in 1996 at the age of 82, the property was purchased by Judith Pillsbury, an art dealer who maintains the garden in the spirit of its original conception, a living tribute to France’s first lady of style. Pillsbury refers to La Louve as the most important work of art she owns.

Advice from the France’s First Lady of Style

Could your garden benefit from these guidelines from Madame de Vésian? Rather than focus on flowers, she concentrated on:

• Simplicity of design — use of clipped evergreen foliage to define spaces. Her style is clean, neat and graphic with repetition of trees, shrubs and evergreens.
• Simplicity of shapes — circles, arcs, curves and clean spheres in evergreen, boxwood, juniper, rosemary, lavender, santolina, myrtle, sage and teucrium. Smaller versions of these woody plants and herbs also look great as potted topiaries.
• Subdued colors — greys, greens, blue-greens, silvers “Why should we contrive to produce flowers of blues, mauves and pinks when the public all walk around in their emerald or orange and yellow shirts?”
• Smooth surfaces and tactile textures — stones, pebbles, rocks and shorn shrubs are Japanese influences. “I am so addicted to textures — very few people feel gardens, they just think about plants, about showing off, but I like to have only three plants.”
• Sense of place — Notice how Nicole de Vésian created a garden using material (pebbles, stones) and plants found locally, creating a dialogue with the surrounding landscape. I refer to that as “listening to the landscape”, looking for visual and horticultural cues like trees, stone, and walls that define a context within the sight lines and surrounding area — the first step we should consider when planning a garden.

For the next few weeks, we continue our cyberjourney through the hillside villages and hidden gardens of France. New posts appear on Tuesdays, so be sure to follow this series.

Next week: The Rose Fanatic of Pithiviers.

Timely tip:

Épernay Bistro & Wine Bar.

If reading this post has whetted your appétit for southern French cuisine, you will want to consider Épernay Bistro in downtown Bridgeport. Yes, you read that correctly. Tired of the loud, overcrowded, overrated restaurants in Westport, Southport and Fairfield, my wife and I decided to give it a try.On a Friday evening in July we found attentive service, generous portions, reasonable pricing and best of all, exceptional food. Chef/owner Peter Wroe prepares classic bistro fare with Italian accents, reminiscent of the hearty cuisine we enjoyed in the narrow alleyways of Old Nice. Get there now, ahead of the critics and the crowds.

Website »

Posted at 08:41 AM | Permalink