Back from a fin de saison visit to our daughter and son in law’s house at Beaulieu sur Mer, high above Beaulieu Bay with a gull’s view of the megayachts at play and the villas and gardens of Cap Ferrat across the water. Sadly the money these days is almost all on what we used to call Gin Palaces. Proper sailing yachts are the rare exceptions; I leap to the binoculars when I see sails approaching.
We’ve been working on the garden here for over ten years now, and parts are already more than mature. I’m afraid we don’t stint on watering as we probably should, but on this precipitous hillside exposed all day to the sun (its local name is La Petite Affrique) no water means no garden. The big excitement of this visit was a storm. There had been no appreciable rain since April. Not much wind for sailors, come to that, either. Saturday dawned bright and clear. Then the atmosphere over the sea dimmed. You could see a grey front to the southwest and smell approaching rain, At teatime thunder and rain came together, vertical clattering rain, the gutters spouted, rivers formed in the gravel; we were marooned in the house all night.
Regular irrigation in a warm climate gives you tremendous growth and keeps your shears constantly at work. Even drought-loving rosemary excels itself; we have thick hedges of it, and eight-foot stone walls completely draped. Lawns of Kikuyu grass, with its racing stolons, have to be watched carefully; they can grow thatch like a cottage and zoom out sideways to climb a drystone wall. Olive trees far prefer bare ground. As for box, as vital here as in London, the caterpillar fight is fierce. Regular spraying with Xen-tra is working, fingers crossed, so far.
The components of the garden are far from original: cypresses, olive and citrus trees, vines on a pergola, wisteria, rosemary, box, lavender, agapanthus, echiums, Anemone japonica, Hydrangea quercifolia, roses (Iceberg loves the heat), Tulbaghia (alias Society Garlic) spreads like mad, and so does perowskia – to our delight when earlier flowers fade. So all green and white and purply colours – no reds (except unstoppable campsis on the house). A general lack of eye-catching highlights, in fact. In the end the whole point is the view, down to the sparkling bay, up to the towering cliffs, and out to the horizon.
