Before becoming a garden designer, Jinny Blom was a social worker, employed by
a charitable trust to care for people with mental problems. So the demands
of creating a garden for the world stage of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show,
which opens on Tuesday, are a doddle in comparison. Much as she enjoyed her
previous incarnation: “It’s so much more fun than spending all night in
casualty with someone who thinks a neutron bomb has just gone off.”
We are in France, driving along the rural roads of the Tarn-et-Garonne on our
way to admire “my favourite wall in France” — a moss-topped edifice at the
Abbaye de Beaulieu near Caylus, and the trout pond, or vivier, beside it.
Not even the relentless bleeps of her mobile, demanding attention to the
pressing minutiae of the Chelsea garden, can divert from the beauty of the
surrounding countryside. The lilac, tamarisk and cercis trees are in full
bloom, bearded irises nestle against old walls and the grass in the meadows
is long and studded with wild flowers.
Blom, one of Britain’s leading garden designers, is known for her naturalistic
approach, and it is this moment of French freshness she is hoping to capture
in her second Chelsea garden for Laurent-Perrier champagne; the first was
with Prince Charles in 2002, for which she won a silver-gilt medal.
At the back of the garden will be a metal structure, which Blom calls the
gloriette. It is essentially an arbour, surrounded by drifts of irises and
peonies and with flowering climbers growing up its supporting poles. The
steeply sloping lines of the roof bring to mind those of the chateaux that
pepper the French countryside.
The gloriette is modelled on a wonderfully hubristic folly that sits in the
corner of Blom’s mother’s garden in St Antonin Noble-Val, a pretty medieval
town which has gained fame as the location for the 2001 film Charlotte Gray.
It is popular with the British, 6,000 of whom visit the town in the summer.
Blom Sr is French-born, but spent most of her life in England, where her
children were raised. Every holiday was spent in France, however. She moved
to St Antonin 11 years ago and bought a house in the centre of the town,
where she has become the chief liaison between the council and the 100 or so
foreigners who have settled there permanently.
With the house came a third of an acre of medieval walled garden on the edge
of town. Why there should be an 18th-century folly within, complete with
fireplace and shuttered windows, nobody knows, but it is the only one in
town and must have made its past gardeners the envy of their neighbours when
it was cold and wet.
Blom Sr has made a little English garden on her plot, with winding paths (“The
French wouldn’t do a bendy path — ever,” says Blom, firmly) and casual
combinations of herbs, perennials and shrubs. Her neighbours, who use their
gardens for regimented rows of vegetables, can’t quite see the point of it,
nor do they understand the concept of “garden designer”, when she tells them
what her daughter does — paysagistes are few and far between in France.
Blom herself has a house in town (without a garden — she shares her mother’s),
a former nun’s “hovel” that she bought in 2003 for £12,000, from a butcher
in Toulouse. She is based in London for most of the year but visits France
regularly, and the duality of her blood and abodes has influenced her garden
at this year’s Chelsea show.
It will contain recognisably French elements, such as flanks of box-headed
limes, which you would see in a chateau garden or a town square, providing
shade for afternoon games of boules. Along the perimeters are quince, figs,
vines, rose hips and medlar.
“In September it is amazing here,” she says. “Everything is dripping with
fruit.”
The landscaping includes a vivier, recalling the one at Beaulieu and traversed
by a clapper bridge similar to those over the streams that run through St
Antonin. The walls are built from clunch, a chalk-based stone, by David
Wilson.
“The walls are pretty special,” Blom says admiringly. “I hope people will
notice them.”
Within the gallic structure, she is trying to introduce a British informality,
mixing the two nations’ approach to gardening in a kind of entente cordiale.
“A purely French garden would have been much more brutal. I wanted to take the
elements that remind me of France and put them in a more relaxed
environment. The English blend things together and make them look lovely.
The French have the lovely things but don’t blend.”
The climate of much of the southern part of the country dictates this
“brutality”: around St Antonin, for example, temperatures start climbing
from about 35C from the end of May. “It can get up to 42C,” says Blom.
“Conversely, it can be bloody cold. When I bought my house in December, it
was minus 15.” The opportunities for lush gardens are therefore limited:
“There is a tiny window at this time of year.”
Appropriately, given Britain’s drought and water restrictions (a borehole has
been sunk at the Chelsea showground to get round this), most of her plants
are drought-friendly and suitable for summer neglect — delphiniums and those
planted at the water’s edge excepted. “Once established, there’s nothing in
here that won’t fight its way.”
As much of France, including the Champagne region, where Laurent- Perrier is
based, is on limestone, she has chosen plants that will do well in such a
soil — roses, peonies, irises and aquilegias, for example. But poor soil
doesn’t have to mean a lack of abundance.
“It’s very similar to the Cotswolds,” says Blom, who, like so many gardeners,
is influenced by the famous garden at Hidcote in Gloucestershire, where the
pavilions and famous stilted hornbeams are decidedly French in flavour.
“Because it is on lime, it reminded me of here. When I was young, we would
visit every season. Those borders were so fine, with their subtle colour
combinations. It also has strong bones: it’s very satisfying to have strong
underpinnings and then delicacy.”
A friend of Blom described the plants in the Chelsea garden as being “vintage
colours”. For instance, Rosa ‘Dioressence’, a lovely washed mauve, is
alongside ‘Chartreuse Ruffles’ iris, which combine lavender and bright
green. There will also be swaying grasses, old roses, wild flowers and
peonies, woven together. “The idea is that it has gone slightly to seed,”
says Blom. “I’m evoking a forgotten corner of a larger garden. There will be
irises and peonies around the gloriette, and the rest is an incidental
wilderness.”
Like all the gardens at Chelsea, constructed to be on show for only a week, it
is hardly “incidental”, but Blom is making a point. “People often say you
can’t garden in this climate,” she says, as we sit in the sunshine on her
mother’s terrace. Both Blom Sr and her daughter are out to prove them wrong.
The Laurent-Perrier garden is at site MA4. There are a few tickets left
for afternoons and evenings only, which must be bought in advance — call
0870 906 3781; Jinny Blom, 020 7253 2100, www.jinnyblom.com — the plants in
her garden can be bought from Crocus after the show; visit www.crocus.co.uk
