We landed in Normandy on D-day, eighty years after the event, to find jeeps clogging the roads, a sea of ancient khaki uniforms and veteran Dakotas roaring over the surf. But it was another British connection that brought us; we came to revisit the most beautiful English garden in France. How many people know that one of the best of the famous collaborations between Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens is on the other side of the Channel? Literally ‘on’. The thirty acres of Le Bois des Moutiers tumbles dramatically down to a cliff-edge and the sea. The garden, and one of Lutyens’ most successful country houses, was commissioned by the Mallet family of bankers at the end of the 19th century. If you book a visit there is still a member of the family to show you round, though today it belongs to the Seydoux, owners of most of France’s cinemas. In 130-odd years it has matured into something that would give its planters justified joy.
Lutyens hit mid-season form with the house; serenely simple at first sight but with precise details that sometimes seem to refer to Gaudi. The partnership with Jekyll gives the surrounding more or less formal gardens complete authority; it is hard to imagine them being otherwise. To the south they melt into orchards, then reach the edge of a slope that comes, in what in Devon would be called a combe, down to the cliff edge far below and what the French, with perhaps unintended poetry, call ‘le grand large’.
The garden, and Vasterival, another woodland treasury of plants created in the 1950s by Princess Greta Sturza, a former Wimbledon champion, face each other across the valley above the sea. The little village of Varengeville, south of Dieppe, is known for its cliff-top church with a richly blue stained glass window by Georges Braque. And inland lies the pastoral Pays d’Auge, source of butter, cider and Calvados.
