Guy's garden

Going to Guy's garden means getting lost. I planned my route, kept the Michelin atlas open at the page, found my way successfully through the lush and rolling hinterland, arrived at Perret, and , yes, for the third time, I was lost. Which lane is it, they all look similar? Sense of direction deserting me, I had to ask at the bar.

When you get there, you can't mistake it, but once inside, you're lost again. Once it was a rectangular field, now it's a labyrinth, a spatial conundrum, rooms and paths and portals and changes of mood as you pass through it.

'Marie-Lise is picking raspberries,' says Guy, 'go and join her. Josette is pruning the roses, she speaks English well.'

Josette I do not know; she is francophone Swiss-English, and has lived in Poole; she has little accent in either language I can discern, and is very charming. I am soon lost again in the raspberry canes having a broken conversation with Marie-Lise, whom I glimpse intermittently. I eat a number of framboises and quite a few wild strawberries, and we establish a connection with a reference to Bergman.

Like Guy, Marie-Lise and her husband Jean-Paul, who is presently given a job with a rake, are my students. They have been teachers until recently, and are keen and competetive in class.

Guy was born in Perret. He spent his childhood there, then went on to Rennes and Paris, where he met beautiful Claudine, the kind of Frenchwoman who always makes me wish I'd been born French, who helped him in his modern maths class, and he became an educational psychologist. He loved to frequent the quais and the flower markets, and claims to have once given Catherine Deneuve instructions as to how to plant water lilies.

Much later he fulfilled his dream and bought, in Perret, an ancient longère with a field behind it. Claudine said that it felt at first as though they were living in the middle of the road; she had only ever lived in an appartment, never in a house. Until the hedges and trees and flowers grew up she says she felt something close to agaraphobia. In a little more than 20 years, it has become a magical place. They still don't live there all the time; Claudine is still working as a primary teacher in St Brieuc, they have an appartment there too.


Charm is the word. Un nid de chardonneret, I described it to them, a goldfinch's nest, and later thought of the connection with the word charm. Charming, pretty, welcoming, to be sure, but also when there one is under a charm, spellbound, elsewhere, apt to be lost.


Inside is a lustre of treasure, stencilled plates and dishes and bols for cider, pots and jugs and other vessels, old tools and country bits and pieces, restored and given dignity again, pretty, worn, oddly shaped and slightly mismatched wine glasses. The front doorway is no more, it has become a china cabinet,

and everywhere Guy's paintings. In the Paris winters, and later in St Brieuc, and dreaming of garden and village, he decided to paint it. The work grew and grew, last year he had an exhibition in the Rohan pavilion in Gouarec, and was beside himself with happiness. They are rich, colourful joyous oils, proficient but slightly naive. He's lately been amusing himself painting on old pieces of glassware, a need to embellish every surface.

Claudine arrives, cheerful and serene and brisk as ever in spite of having worked all morning and come back to a houseful, some of whom she doesn't know. Without ever once seeming to fuss or flap, she keeps us up to the fairly tight schedule, before the events of the afternoon. It would be very easy to dawdle and linger and gossip. We brave the blustery showers and eat our sandwiches and then the raspberries with crème fraiche outdoors under the parasol.



Other people, and this rather engaging King Charles spaniel, appear over lunch time. When the tour party, mostly English, arrive, and set off round the garden, everyone seems to be doing fine without my help, so I lag behind and take in the detail.

I didn't bother with grammar corrections, lessons are finished, we're on holiday. Anyway, it's too late now, it's been printed, and it's very sweet.



Frogs in our garden are brownish, secretive, occasional, far outnumbered by toads, who are all right in their way but have some rather nasty habits. The frogs here are jewelled and enamelled green and gold, and bask and display themselves and are very much at home. I can imagine any of them would be more than happy to retrieve the golden ball and be kissed in return.

English-style, they tell me proudly, which means paths not straight and David Austin roses. But to me it has only its own style: created with purpose and passion and large amounts of love.