The community gardens of Amboise

Les jardins familiales are a deep-rooted French tradition.

07/26/2005
The community gardens of Amboise
Denis and I celebrated Bastille Day (July 14) by marking it with our annual pilgrimage to the International Garden Festival at Chaumont-sur-Loire. As usual, we spent the night at our favorite hotel and table, Le Choiseul, in the nearby town of Amboise. We were heading toward just that destination after a long afternoon at the festival, when I spotted an enormous and beautiful community garden on the levee beside the Loire. As I rubbernecked to keep it in view as long as possible, I vowed that as soon as we checked in at the hotel, I would head back out to see this splendid garden, which was just about half a kilometer back up the road.

After a quick shower, I set out on foot to see this garden, following a path alongside the lazy Loire. The heat was still intense at 7 in the evening, and the low sun shone like a spotlight on the riverside scenario. I saw lone fishermen, floating silently in the small, square-prowed boats that are traditional in the Loire valley. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a large rock plummet into the middle of the river. Just as I was puzzling how that could be, as there was no one about to have thrown it, it fell again. It wasn't a rock at all, but a fishing bird. It would fly rapidly over the water, searching for likely prey with apparently keen eyesight. Then, after hovering over a spot by "treading air" with its wings, it would drop like a rock, beak down, by simply folding its wings at its sides.

My trance over this bird was broken when the garden hove into view. On this holiday evening, it was virtually deserted, and I felt uninhibited on my voyeuristic mission. I happen to have a special affection for community gardens--jardins de familles, as the gardens formerly known as jardins d'ouvriers (workers' gardens) have been redubbed. First of all, these are after all potagers, a sort of garden which most of you realize is dear to my heart. But there is something more... These are potagers of people determined to have a garden--even when they don't own the land on which to plant one. And community gardens have a social aspect that is mostly lacking from a private potager. By definition communal (even though they consist of individual plots), community gardens are places where gardeners get together to share stories, a glass of wine, perhaps trade some produce.

In France, each community garden plot has a cabanon-- a garden shed that serves not only as a shelter for tools and supplies, but as a place to rest in the shade and chat with your gardener neighbors. In the past, these cabanons were wonderfully individualistic, usually constructed of salvaged materials. Unfortunately, under the dull socialist influence of the Mitterand years in France, many community gardens adopted "regulation" sheds of a prefab nature that are infinitely less interesting than the old individual sheds. This homegeneity was of course imposed in the name of "cleanliness" in an effort to eradicate any eyesore junkheaps. Most of the cabanons in the Amboise community garden were unfortunately of the "official" variety. But, noticing that each shed was numbered, and wanting to see the one labeled "1", to my delight I came upon this lovely wood shed which perhaps was allowed to remain unhomogenized in deference to its seniority.

Like most things in France, community garden plot ownership doesn't change rapidly. It is not unusual for a plot to be passed down from one generation to the next. As a result, there's a lot more than beans and tomatoes in these gardens. People don't hesitate to plant fruit trees, brambles, roses, and since we're in the Loire, wine grapes. French community gardeners have a long-term attitude about their plots.

The gardens also express the French love of privacy. Most of the plots were difficult to see into, with tall plantings of fruit trees and shrubs along the access roadway. Gates figured in almost every plot, often heavily shrouded in flowering vines. Several offered tantalizing peaks into the private life of the cabanon. In one, I glimpsed onion seed heads drying on a table. In another, a bottle of wine awaited the return of the gardener and perhaps his neighbor, who would be invited to prendre un verre (take a glass) during the heat of a summer afternoon. I imagined a couple of elderly men, debating garden techniques and perhaps the curvaceous merits of the lady bending over her bush beans next door.

Another thing I love about community gardens is that they're always full of homespun ingenuity borne of frugality. Recycling was everywhere in evidence in the Amboise gardens, in everything from building materials to plant supports to watering systems. A cold frame--now wide open in the heat of summer--had been fashioned from an old window sash. The gardens were full of rain barrels, as French gardeners firmly believe in the merits of rainwater, not the least of which is that it is free.

In another garden, a shrub rose sheltered a stack of fruit tree prunings that had been meticulously sorted according to size, and which would undoubtedly be put to use as stakes, supports, and who knows what else. One thing was clear: nothing would be wasted. In a world where we unthinkingly throw away more in a week than most of our grandparents discarded in a year, I admire the frugal spirit of the community gardener. Without even thinking about it as such, these gardeners are acting ecologically.

I experience a lot of emotion in these jardins familiales, mostly because I find them so touchingly human. Completely without pretentious airs, these are gardens that are 100% authentic. They are modest. They are communal, and yet, in each one, I can read the personality of the individual gardener. Built without knowledge of "garden design", these are gardens that seduce you with their unselfconscious charm. Most of all, they are gardens that testify to the strength of the human desire to plant a seed and nourish oneself with what it produces.

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