Russell Page Archive: Château de Bléneau

Château de Bléneau, Bléneau, Yonne, France

1950 to 1951

Château de Bléneau c.1987, © Marina Schinz

Archive of Garden Design Ref:  RP/1/6/73

Page’s designs for the garden at the château de Bléneau are among the earliest to survive in the archive. In 1950, he was asked by Monsieur and Madame Matossian to harmonise the disparate elements of their grounds, as described in The Education of a Gardener:

‘This house is the remains of a fortified castle, whose moat and gatehouse still exist. I made a wide lawn inside and to one side of the house a small formal garden of box-edged beds intersected by narrow gravel paths and filled with the dark red floribunda rose “Alain.” The main reception rooms, as in many houses of the period, are on the first floor; so I had to connect the great salon to the garden by a double flight of stone steps, leading down into this small formal garden. To add gaiety to the composition, I designed the little rose garden round a series of yard-square stone-edged pools, each with its tiny water jet to sparkle in the sun with its splashing.’ (226)

It was one of the projects which Page undertook whilst working in partnership with the Vilmorin company, Paris-based seed producers since the 18^th century. Page had been invited by his long-standing friend André de Vilmorin to join forces with his family’s firm after the Second World War. Working from the Vilmorin office, Page’s brief was to encourage clients to grow flowers again, after several years of wartime shortages had meant gardens were mainly used to produce vegetables and fruit. At Bléneau, although the plans do indicate that a sizeable area of the garden remained dedicated to vegetables (see RP/1/6/73/1 and RP/1/6/73/2 on which sections are marked ‘legumes’), the new designs were largely concerned with flower gardens. The small formal rose garden to which Page referred in The Education of a Gardener is called the ‘Jardin de Madame’ on the plan (RP/1/6/73/5). The geometrical design of six square pools, and the combination of water and the scented flowers, hints at Page’s interest in Islamic gardens. Although the influence of Moorish gardens would become more pronounced in the 1960s, when Page was working in Southern Spain, he had first explored Persian gardens when visiting Iran in the late 1940s, having been asked by the British Council to design parks and gardens for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Abadan (the project never came to fruition).

Also included in the drawings is a design for a bridge to cross the moat, another example of Page’s ease composing architectural – as well as landscape and horticultural – elements.

Note

The clients’ name is spelt Matassian on some of the early drawings but Matossian, as it is written later, is more likely to be the correct spelling.

Literature

Page, Russell. The Education of a Gardener. Harvill, 1994.

van Zuylen, Gabrielle and Marina Schinz. The Gardens of Russell Page. Frances Lincoln Ltd, 2008.

Related material elsewhere

There are photographs of the château de Bléneau garden in the RHS Lindley Library reference collection (PAG/2/1/11, PAG/2/1/25 and PAG/2/1/28).