Le Jardin des Cordeliers

A very personal public garden in Digne-les-Bains

09/16/2008
Le Jardin des Cordeliers
My initial impression of the Jardin des Cordeliers was of a rather conventional garden. A series of clipped boxwood hedges seemed to promise a potentially banal French public garden. After all, I was in Digne-les-Alpes, a town at the northernmost border of Haute Provence, at a geologic gateway to the Alpes. Although Digne has a bit of ochre in common with the rest of Provence, it is profoundly already a mountain town--more austere and, well, a bit stodgy compared to towns farther south.

The Jardin des Cordeliers promotes itself as a botanic garden. I admit as I entered the garden, I was skeptical. I thought I pretty well knew the genre--a prosaic collection of quite ordinary plants pretentiously dubbed "botanic garden" by an overly proud city government. Glancing around, I saw no uniformed city employee. But as I followed the path past a small cabanon toward the heart of the garden, I caught a glimpse of a dark-haired woman. She smiled at me, then turned back to pruning an unruly shrub rose. A small, shaggy gray dog lay at her feet, its eyes never leaving her. Neither of them was wearing a uniform.

As I penetrated into the first quadrant of the garden, I experienced a sense of amazement that turned to downright wonder. An extraordinary tree bole caught my eye, swirling with a complex grain developed over centuries and weathered silver, artfully placed at my feet in ornamentation. From my hikes in the region, I guessed it to be an old stump of the local white oak, Quercus pubescens.

A bit further on, an ammonite curled gracefully against a background of dark foliage. As we'd been exploring the region of Digne, I knew that this was an homage to the rich deposits of fossil ammonites in the area.

It only took a few moments to realize that this garden was anything but a trite public park. It is surrounded by walls, making it a jardin clos and giving it that inimitable air of a secret garden. In a nod to the tradition of such a walled garden, it is divided into four quadrants. One is planted to aromatic plants. Here the rich palette of aromatic plants native to the region (lavenders, rosemary, sage, savory, thymes) rub shoulders with fragrant species from far-off continents. A splendid specimen of monks' pepper (Vitex

agnus-castus) was in full bloom, its branched spikes of vivid lavender-blue alive with butterflies. (The curious common name of this plant comes from its use as a condiment in monasteries, which had the supposed effect of calming sexual desire.)

Another quadrant is dedicated to wild medicinal plants, again part of the rich local flora and ethnobotanical tradition.

These are organized according to their different biotopes--the environmental niches where they are found. Wetland meadow, talus slope, dry streambed, forest understory, and other environments are represented.

One thing I immediately appreciated about the garden was that the plants are meticulously labeled with tjheir Latin names, something that is often missing in French gardens. In fact, in general, French gardeners seem to eschew the use of Latin names for reasons that elude me entirely.

At the north edge of the garden, the path led us to an enchanted spot. A vine-covered pergola sheltered an inviting bench from where, bathed in deep green shade, one could contemplate the garden beyond. And as if to help put you in a reflective mood, fragments of poetry, copied in childish writing on pieces of transparent plexiglass and suspended from the edges of the pergola, floated in the breeze. Obviously this had been a project involving students from the middle school that borders the garden. At left: "The whispering of trees in the night
Are the words you don't say to me
And that fill my soul."

It was when I came upon this pergola that the full realization hit me: This garden may be public, but it was someone's garden. It was too charming to belong entirely to the department of public works. The evidence was in the details: the garden was lovingly cared for--obviously hand-weeded, and it was full of highly personal whimsy.

The next quadrant was my favorite, for the simple reason that it was a potager. And as all you regular readers know, I'm only half gardener. The other half of me is cook, and that means I have what the French call un faible (a weakness) for food gardens. And this one was especially charming. For one thing, it contained small hedges of petit épautre--the ancient grain that is the keystone of traditional agriculture in the region. Although I'd admired the gracile quality of épautre in fields around our house, I'd never realized how lovely it could look in a potager. I immediately made plans to plant some in my future Provençal potager. This potager clearly featured ancient food plants from all over the world, including amaranth, which was paired with...just what was the plant that had formed those charming, red-gold, willowy stalks? Why, it was a beet, allowed to flower and grow to seed! Now why hadn't I thought of that? Actually, I had, decades ago, when I read in a novel of Tom Robbins that beet pollen has an intoxicating fragrance. (Who knows if it's true?!) But Indiana winters were too frigid to allow my biennial beets to overwinter. The sight of those pretty stalks reminded me I could now, in my mild French environment, try the Tom Robbins experiment.

This potager--like any proper French potager--was also full of flowers. There was croscosmia, the requisite dahlias everywhere, and the charming Chinese lanterns that are--to me--the very embodiment of the beauty of autumn.

Denis finally pried me out of my potager reverie to explore another part of the garden. Here, propped against an old cherry tree, was an old fruit-picking ladder (the pointed top permits propping it against branches). And hanging from the branches of the tree were the most fanciful objects: enormous globes that had been covered in various organic materials--such as strips of bark. The globes had openings which immediately gave them the air of being animal dwellings of some sort. This garden was becoming curiouser and curiouser, as Alice said after she drank the shrinking potion and slipped through the door into the mysterious garden beyond. We admired these globes for a long time before moving on, coming around full circle to the back of the cabanon we had seen when entering.

There was the dark-haired lady again. Denis and I tripped over each other in asking, "Who made those globes?"

"I did," was the modest reply and the start of a long conversation with Diana Moriconi. She was the creator not only of those fanciful globes but of most of the garden as well. (That's her and her dog Tchai at right.) The fact that she is an artist as well as gardener explained, of course, the emotional charm of the Jardin des Cordeliers. And her passion for plants was why the garden was so lovingly cared for--why it just did not feel like a city park. We arranged to buy one of her beautiful globes, which now hangs from our terrace roof. And we hope, one day in the near future, to see a garden designed by Diana Moriconi at the International Garden Festival at Chaumont-sur-Loire. Her imagination certainly deserves a wider audience than it receives in this jewel of a garden tucked away in the mountains of Haute Provence.

Le Jardin des Cordeliers
Across from the Musée Gassendi (en centre ville)
Tel: +33 (0)4 92 31 59 59
Entry free
Open Monday through Friday, 15 March through 15 November
9 s.m.-12 noon and 2 p.m.-6 p.m.
In July and August, afternoon hours are 3 p.m.-7 p.m.
Handicap accessible; English spoken

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