Exploring Château Marouatte: The Garden at My Feet

 Exploring Château Marouatte: The Garden at My Feet

Part 2

After exploring the courtyards, patios, doors and wonderfully unexpected storage spaces around Château Marouatte, I started looking in a different direction.

Down.

It is easy to be distracted here by towers, stone walls, ancient timbers and sweeping views. But some of the most interesting discoveries are growing only a few inches above the ground, tucked into gravel, spilling over stones or finding a foothold in what seems like an impossible crack.

So Part 2 of my château exploration became a much smaller journey.

A garden journey.

Photo IMG_4920

One of the easiest plants to notice is the beautiful purple-flowering shrub growing around the grounds. The long flower clusters are made from dozens of tiny lavender-purple tubular blossoms, each with a warm orange center.

This appears to be Buddleja davidii, commonly called butterfly bush, and in France Buddleia du père David. The identification fits remarkably well. The French Office for Biodiversity describes it as having long, dense flower panicles containing numerous pink-to-violet tubular flowers and long lance-shaped leaves. 

There is an interesting bit of French history attached to it. Although native to China, Buddleja was introduced into France in the nineteenth century and became widely planted as an ornamental. It has adapted so successfully that France now classifies it as an invasive exotic species. 

I simply knew that the flowers were beautiful.

Photo IMG_4936

And apparently I was not the only one who thought so.

When I returned with my camera, the Buddleja had become its own little dining room. In my photograph, two very different insects are visiting the same cluster of flowers. The close-up suddenly transforms a pretty garden shrub into a miniature ecosystem.

It is one of my favorite photographs from this little exploration because it captures something I might have walked right past.

Photos IMG_4921 and IMG_4922

Nearby, another plant was going through a completely different stage of its season.

These thick, fleshy leaves and broad clusters are characteristic of stonecrop, in the Sedum/Hylotelephium group. Stonecrops store water in their succulent leaves and are particularly well suited to dry, rocky, well-drained conditions. They produce dense clusters of tiny star-shaped flowers, often pink, that gradually age toward deeper brown and burgundy tones. 

My photographs caught the plant in transition.

Some portions of the flower heads have already turned brown and gone to seed, while small pale pink flowers and buds are still emerging underneath and between them. Instead of looking finished for the year, the plant seems to be displaying several chapters of its life cycle at once.

Against an old château wall, that somehow seems appropriate.

Photo IMG_4924

Then there are the volunteers.

Two bright yellow composite flowers were standing almost defiantly beside the gravel. They appear to belong to the broad dandelion/chicory family, Asteraceae, although I would not try to assign an exact species from this photograph alone.

I like them precisely because they do not appear to have been invited.

They simply found a little patch of ground and grew.

There is something very different about the gardens here compared with formal gardens where every plant seems to know exactly where it is supposed to stand. At Marouatte, cultivated plants and wild plants frequently overlap. A flower can emerge beside a gravel road, beneath an old wall or between stones.

Photo IMG_4925

Then there is this glorious blast of magenta.

This is very likely Mirabilis jalapa, known in France as belle-de-nuit and in English as the four-o’clock flower or marvel of Peru. The large funnel-shaped flowers, brilliant magenta color and surrounding buds are characteristic of the species. 

Its French name, belle-de-nuit, is particularly lovely because these flowers generally open toward the end of the afternoon and remain open into the night, often releasing their fragrance as evening arrives. 

So while I was photographing a flower, I was also photographing a plant with its own daily clock.

Photo IMG_4937

Another purple plant caught my eye because of its foliage rather than its flowers.

The deeply divided, silvery-gray leaves and small lavender-blue flowers suggest a Perovskia-type plant, now botanically classified within Salvia, commonly called Russian sage. I am less certain of this identification from the photograph alone, so I would leave the exact species open.

But the foliage is wonderful.

The pale, almost dusty green is completely different from the lush greens surrounding it. Against old pale limestone and gravel, plants with silver foliage seem almost perfectly designed for the setting.

And then I began noticing what was actually covering the ground.

Photo IMG_4948

What initially looks like ordinary green ground cover becomes surprisingly intricate when photographed close up.

Tiny leaves form dense mats between grasses and other low plants. There are minute flower heads scattered among them. Rather than one uniform lawn species, the ground appears to be a mosaic of very small plants occupying every available space.

This is the sort of vegetation that thrives where mowing, walking, gravel, thin soil and summer dryness keep taller plants from taking over.

It is not a perfect green lawn.

It is much more interesting than that.

Photo IMG_4949

Here the same effect is even clearer.

A single yellow flower rises above an extraordinary patchwork of low vegetation. There are tiny mat-forming plants, broader fuzzy leaves, dry grass, little stones and bare patches of earth all within a few inches of one another.

It is essentially a miniature landscape.

And it tells you something about the conditions here. Plants growing at ground level have to cope with shallow soil, exposed limestone, gravel and periods of dryness. Species that hug the ground or store water have a considerable advantage.

Which brings me to one of my favorite discoveries.

Photo IMG_4964

Growing directly across an old stone surface is a wonderful combination of moss and succulent stonecrop.

This is exactly the sort of microhabitat where stonecrops excel. Their fleshy leaves store moisture, allowing them to survive in shallow, rocky and dry soils where many other plants cannot. Stonecrop is commonly associated with rock gardens, walls and other sharply drained environments. 

Look closely at the photograph.

The moss forms thick, soft cushions over the stone while tiny succulent stems creep through and around it. There is almost no conventional soil visible at all. The plants are effectively creating their own tiny garden on top of the rock.

That may be what fascinated me most during this walk.

At Château Marouatte, nature does not seem particularly concerned about the distinction between architecture and garden.

Moss claims the stone.

Succulents creep across the walls.

Wildflowers appear beside the gravel.

Buddleja feeds visiting insects.

The belle-de-nuit waits for evening to open its brilliant flowers.

And an old piece of limestone, left alone long enough, becomes a garden of its own.

I started this exploration looking at the château.

By the end, I was photographing the ground beneath my feet.

Sometimes the smallest spaces have the most to see.