Exploring Château Marouatte: Beyond the Gates and Into the Orchard

 Exploring Château Marouatte: Beyond the Gates and Into the Orchard

Part 7

After spending so much time exploring the central courtyard and the buildings immediately surrounding the château, I began wondering about the gates along the side.

Where did they go?

There was only one way to find out.

I slipped through the gate and suddenly the scale changed. Behind me were the massive stone walls, towers, arches and intimate courtyard spaces I had been photographing. Ahead of me was something entirely different: a large open field disappearing into trees.

Photo 1

The transition is almost hidden.

A white van was parked beneath an enormous evergreen, and just beyond it I could see the iron gate standing open. From the courtyard side, there was little indication of how much land lay beyond it.

I walked through.

The clipped gravel and architecture gave way almost immediately to grass, earth and trees. It felt less like entering another part of the château and more like slipping out through its back door into the countryside.

Photo 2

Before getting very far, I looked down.

The pale limestone is never very far away here. A slab of it actually breaks through the surface beside the path, mottled with dark patches of lichen. Soil and pine needles have collected in its hollows, and grass is beginning to grow wherever it can find enough material to anchor its roots.

It was another reminder that the château and its landscape ultimately come from the same thing: stone.

Then the trees opened up.

Photo 3

This was much larger than I had expected.

A broad grassy field stretched toward the woods, bounded in places by old stone walls. Scattered across it were young trees, many of them recently planted.

They are fruit trees, and it is fascinating to see an orchard at this stage of its life.

Some of the young trunks have protective coverings around their bases. Others are supported as they establish themselves. Right now they look almost insignificant against the enormous mature trees surrounding the field.

But imagine this same view ten or fifteen years from now.

Those little trees will have developed broad crowns. Spring should bring blossom, followed by shade and, depending upon the varieties planted, fruit later in the year.

The exact varieties cannot be determined from these distant photographs, so I am not going to turn them into apples, pears, plums or cherries simply for the sake of a better story. What I can say is that planting fruit trees in the grounds of an old French estate continues a very long tradition. Historic château gardens commonly combined ornamental spaces with productive orchards and kitchen gardens. French garden-history sources describe estates where fruit trees, vines, herbs and vegetables were integral parts of the landscape rather than something hidden away from it. 

This part of Marouatte isn’t just preserving the past.

Someone is planting for the future.

Photos 4 and 5

Of course, I started looking at the ground again.

What looks like “grass” from a distance isn’t really a conventional lawn at all. It is a mixed, rather dry meadow-like turf, with grasses interspersed with broadleaf plants.

One of the most conspicuous plants forms flat rosettes of long, narrow, ribbed leaves. These appear consistent with ribwort plantain, Plantago lanceolata, although I would want flowers or seed heads for absolute identification. The French name is plantain lancéolé. France’s national biodiversity inventory describes it as a perennial whose leaves form basal rosettes and are linear-lanceolate to oval-lanceolate with several strong longitudinal veins. 

Once I recognized the pattern, I could see these rosettes scattered all through the field.

There are also several different grasses, some low creeping plants, clover-like leaves and finer, feathery foliage. One of the photographs includes a small flat cluster of white flowers above delicate divided leaves. That may be yarrow (Achillea millefolium), but there isn’t enough floral detail for me to identify it confidently.

This is really a mixed grass-and-forb sward, rather than a manicured monoculture lawn. That is why its texture changes every few feet. Some areas are green and thick, others have gone straw-colored in the summer dryness, while tough rosette-forming plants remain vividly green.

It is actually much more interesting to photograph than perfect turf.

Photo 6

Walking farther across the field gave me another perspective on just how large this area is.

The young fruit trees are scattered across the grass while mature woodland forms an almost continuous green wall around the perimeter. At the far side, the old crenellated stone wall suddenly reappears.

That wall was important visually.

Without it, I could have been standing in almost any rural field in the Dordogne.

With it, I was unmistakably still inside the world of Marouatte.

And then I noticed something tucked against the edge of the field.

A garden.

Photo 7

This was not the formal château garden I might have expected.

It was loose, wonderfully informal and slightly wild.

Two Gothic-shaped metal garden chairs sit on the gravel in the foreground, almost as though someone had been sitting there and simply walked away. Behind them, plants spill over one another along the old stone wall.

There appear to be several different layers of planting here. I can see what looks like grapevine, with its broad lobed leaves climbing near the wall. There are masses of small white daisy-like flowers close to the ground, mixed herbaceous plants, grasses and taller stems that have been allowed to develop naturally rather than being clipped into formal beds.

There are also pots scattered through the space and young trees beyond.

The structure farther back is particularly interesting. Rough wooden posts and a horizontal beam form a simple support that could carry climbing plants or vines.

The garden feels less like a display garden and more like a working country garden.

That distinction matters. Historically, gardens associated with French estates were not necessarily purely decorative. Fruit, herbs, vines and vegetables could occupy important parts of the grounds. At the Potager du Roi at Versailles, for example, fruit trees were historically integrated throughout productive garden spaces, while modern cultivation there still includes herbs such as thyme, rosemary and sage. 

I cannot identify every plant in this photograph reliably, and I would rather leave some unnamed than invent an identification. But the overall planting tells its own story: vines, flowering groundcovers, herbs or herb-like perennials, young trees and volunteer plants are all growing together.

It is a garden that seems perfectly comfortable being a little untidy.

I rather liked that.

And then, beyond the garden, I found another gateway.

That seems to be the recurring pattern at Château Marouatte.

Every time I think I have reached the edge of something, there is another opening.

A door leads to a courtyard.

A courtyard leads to a gate.

The gate leads to a field.

The field leads to an orchard.

The orchard leads to a garden.

And the garden leads to yet another gateway.

So, naturally, I went through it.

The exploration wasn’t over yet.