Into the garden
This week, I reflect on planting our garden, banishing the bamboo and the uterus pool, and I order some bulbs. Plus a market haul and a recipe for oeufs cocotte aux champignons.
When we used to come to Marseillan on what some might call a holiday, others might view as a special ops mission to spy on this house, each time I walked past on the way to and from the port, I would peer through the railings to get a better look, to take in the details, to wonder if anyone lived here.
These reconnaissance missions were hindered by the forest of scruffy, unremarkable trees and tatty bamboo which filled the front garden. One of my first projects on getting here was to clear the undergrowth. This served two purposes. Given that I’m not gifted in the fine arts of roofing, plumbing and rewiring, it gave me something physical to work on to momentarily still the internal cries of “What have we done?” (PS It’s now, amazingly, three years since we moved here. I’m going to write about what we’ve learned from three years of living in France this weekend, so stay tuned if that interests you.)
And second, it allowed me to get to know the neighbours. I was not the only one with a peering-through-the-railings habit. People were kind, delighted that after so many years, someone had taken on the Sleeping Beauty house. One morning as I stood up to my shoulders in a heap of hacked-down bamboo, an older gentleman in a crisp, blue, short-sleeved shirt stopped to say hello. What was I doing with the bamboo? Could I spare some for a project he was working on? Yes, I most certainly could. How much did he want? Did he have a van? Would he like to borrow our trailer? No, no, he explained. He would go home and measure and work out how much he needed. When he returned the next morning, it turned out he needed 50cm. After I was reassured he could carry it home without assistance, I let him have it.
As I began to plan this new garden I realised that, like so many of life’s important endeavours, the secret to gardening is editing. Plant too many different types of flowers and shrubs and it looks bitty and uncoordinated, fill it with too many objets, and it looks like an explosion in a second-rate garden centre. Imagine, then, my dilemma. In my fairly modest front garden, over there, to the right, by the big old stone wall and the vine, there was a pool. That sounds great, doesn’t it, especially as in the summers here the heat often climbs into the high 30Cs?
Except – like the bamboo - my best Esther Williams impersonation in floral swimming cap and waterproof eye-makeup would be visible to any poor, passing soul. And there was another, more delicate problem. There was no getting around it. Believe me, I tried. I looked at it at every angle. The pool was uterus shaped. While that may have been very convenient for all my full-moon witchcraft rituals, I generally like a little more privacy for them and besides, the candlewax and woad get everywhere. Also, the pump was broken so it filled with rainwater. When we arrived that September I was, without warning or training, the owner of the village’s most prolific mosquito breeding programme, and here we are cursed with tiger mosquitos, which don’t even have the courtesy to make a noise before ravaging your pale flesh. The late society gardener, Rosemary Verey, never had to put up with this. The pool had to go. No one can style out a uterus that takes up a quarter of their garden.
All of this I had to tackle before I even got to the fun part, which is the planting. This presented new challenges. In my London garden, I was obsessed with trying to get flowers to flourish in the shade. Here I have the opposite problem, with 300 days of sunshine a year. But suddenly, those delicate blooms I coaxed into life in my city garden are too easy to grow. So easy that they’re on every roundabout in such abundance that I now think they might be vulgar, common even. I was thinking about buying – at eye-watering cost - a cloud-pruned olive tree as a centrepiece for the middle bed, but then I saw our vet’s office had four of them in the car park and I worried they might be the Mediterranean equivalent of privet. But into my garden notebook went my dreams: Lavender? Mimosa? Wisteria? How many citrus? Is Russian sage too much of a roundabout plant? Is it too hot for hydrangeas?
Truthfully, this was all a kind of displacement activity. More than with pictures of my old house, when photographs of our London garden popped up unexpectedly on my phone, something caught in my throat. I couldn’t bring myself to change the picture of it that was the banner on my Twitter/X account for months and months, with all its thymes and rosemaries tumbling onto brick paths and arches of pink Constance Spry roses. We planted that garden from scratch over 20 years ago, and it became the backdrop to some of the happiest moments in our lives. So many Sunday mornings included weeding empty glasses from the flower beds and cigarette butts out of the gravel after another party.
And I missed my plants, a lot of them gifts from friends, cuttings and slips from their own gardens. We couldn’t bring any of them with us, as since Brexit you require an expensive licence for each one, so we distributed anything in pots around north London, sometimes to the same people who gave them to us in the first place. It makes me happy to think of them flourishing in their new homes, with old friends. Sometimes I even visit them.
I’m thinking about this because next week, we’re having two of our best friends to stay, both of them exceptional gardeners. Last year, they helped me lay out the shape of the garden and start the planting scheme, so I’m keen for them to see how it’s coming along. I’ve also ordered hundreds of bulbs from Farmer Gracy, to arrive during their visit, so they can help me with the backbreaking job of planting them. They don’t know this yet.
As a reward, I’ll take them to the Friday flower market in Béziers, some of the nurseries I love, and perhaps a couple of my favourite public gardens. There is, apparently, a garden near here that’s famous for its bamboo. Not going there. Too triggering.
Oeufs cocotte aux champignons
Baked eggs with mushrooms
This is such an easy brunch, lunch or supper dish – serve it with a green salad to make it into a main meal. If you want to prepare it ahead, you can make the mushrooms with crème fraîche the day before and keep it sealed in the fridge until you’re ready to cook it. Just spoon the mixture into the ramekins, break the eggs over the top and sprinkle on the cheese and you’re ready to go.
Serves 2
30g butter
1 shallot, about 70g, finely diced
30g lardons or bacon, smoked or unsmoked, finely diced
1 bay leaf
200g chestnut mushrooms, cut into thickish slices
200g crème fraîche
4 tbsp single cream
Some soft herbs – I used about 1 tbsp chopped chives, 1 tbsp chopped parsley and 1 tsp chopped tarragon. You could use any or all of these. Chervil is also good. Keep some back to garnish
2 eggs
20g Comté or Gruyère cheese
Salt and freshly-ground black pepper
Heat the oven to 200C/180C Fan/Gas 6.
Warm a frying pan over a medium-low heat and sauté the shallot and lardons with the bay leaf for about 5 minutes, stirring from time to time. Raise the temperature to medium-high and add the mushrooms with a good pinch of salt. Fry quite hard until the mushrooms lose some of their moisture and take on some colour.
Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the crème fraîche and cream until well incorporated. Return to a gentle heat to warm through slightly, then stir in the herbs, taste and season well with salt and pepper.
Spoon the mixture into 2 large ramekins. Carefully break an egg on top of each one and sprinkle on some cheese. Place the ramekins on an oven tray (they may bubble over a bit) and bake for 8-10 minutes until bubbling and the whites of the eggs are set. Serve immediately, with bread or toast.
Market haul, 24 September 2024
This week’s market haul comprises: ham, onions, egg, aubergines, red peppers, avocados, green beans, tomatoes, black radish, green peppers, burrata, cèp sausages, pears, plums, parsley, fromage frais.
Ahh, we love Farmer Gracy too! Your garden looks amazing already. 😁
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