Duo create stunning garden on an expanded horticultural canvas in Lot-et-Garonne

The Ile d’Oléron off the west coast of France has only been connected to the mainland since 1966, when a nearly 3km-long bridge was opened. Life on the island, apart from tourism, was centred on fishing and its oyster farms. 

When Thierry Lecetre was born there, one might have expected him to become an ostréiculteur (oyster farmer) like generations of his family, but Thierry preferred flower beds to oyster beds and studied horticulture. His passion was for flowers and plants and he became a lecturer in the college at Saintes on the mainland. 

He didn’t pull up his island roots though, and when he inherited his grandmother’s house, he set to work creating a wonderful garden which allowed him to use his considerable talents. Thierry’s garden attracted the notice of the local tourist office which encouraged him to open it to the public. It became an attraction for holidaymakers and residents alike. It soon gained a Remarkable Gardens label, recognising its qualities.

Meanwhile, faraway, another boy, Michael Devine, born in the lovely countryside outside Sheffield and then transplanted to the wilds of Sutherland in the far north of Scotland, was also finding his passion for growing things. His parents gave him two square metres and Michael was hooked. 

He recalls buying an apple tree with his pocket money. “I planted it, I looked after it. It grew but there was no fruit. My mum explained I would need to pollinate it from a neighbour’s tree. When I did and there were THREE apples, I was so proud!” Michael went off to university in Edinburgh looking to go into law. In the end he plumped for marketing and ended up in London. When that palled, in his thirties he took a year out and did a garden design course. “I started having clients with small town gardens, who wanted many of the same plants. It was a bit restricted,” he remembers.

A joint project

Both Thierry and Michael were into yoga and fate brought them together at a yoga retreat in Spain. Eventually Michael went to live and garden with Thierry on the Ile d’Oléron. Thierry was restless though. The garden had become a victim of its own success. Walled in, it couldn’t be expanded. With a hundred visitors a day sometimes it was just too crowded. Thierry wanted a bigger canvas, an open vista, he wanted space. 

The two of them began to search for the perfect property. Michael laughs, “Thierry’s French – he didn’t want an old house. We wanted light and space: small house, big garden. And no close neighbours – on Oléron we had seven properties which bounded the garden. We looked all over. We were very taken with Pyrénées-Atlantiques, then Thierry suggested Brittany. I said no, if I’d wanted weather like that I could have stayed in England! 

“Then some friends recommended the area around Eymet. We found this place, just over the border in Lot-et-Garonne. It was a part of a farm. The farmer had built a house 20 years ago, just moving out of the older buildings. It had five hectares of land. It had possibilities.” 

They set to work immediately – they used the lawnmower to mark out shapes and paths. Thierry, on his hugely expanded canvas, began to create his gardens at La Clapiéra. From a neglected pasture – a field with trees and brambles around it as Michael described it – Thierry made beautiful gardens covering 1.5hectares. 

Michael has converted the old building into two gîtes for people to come and stay. “It was quite the transition,” Michael tells me. “The change from enclosed to open, the difference in scale, the soil and especially the climate. The weather was so different. It’s so much hotter and drier here. The winters are harder. It’s all more extreme.” 

Paying attention to the plants and their needs, but also understanding that the garden had to be sustainable, was the way forward. Many of Thierry’s favourite plants came from the garden at Oléron but others could not thrive in this new environment. “We don’t want irrigation systems,” Michael tells me when we speak in the midst of a fierce canicule (heatwave). “We’d visit some gardens nearby and they all had irrigation. We thought we must find another way. We use straw for mulching. A good 15cm depth. It keeps the roots cool and the moisture in the soil. And it breaks down and feeds the soil. The first year Thierry had planted a lovely pink salvia, S. microphylla Icing Sugar. It was mulched with straw and it survived temperatures of 40˚C that summer – it didn’t look fabulous until things cooled but it made it through. In September, it flourished!” 

A passion for salvias

Salvias are Thierry’s passion. In Oléron they were the first things he planted. By the end he had some two hundred different sages. At the new garden there are 120 salvias. The tall South American ones such as S. guaranitica (including Amistad and Black & Blue) flag in temperatures over 32˚C. “Even the dahlias are scorching,” says Michael. “We’ve added buddleias. They grow fast and create shade for other plants in the borders. When we came we were thrilled by the richness of the wild flowers and we have preserved some of that. We just cut it once a year, letting the seedheads remain. We have a succession of flowers from orchids, marguerites, flax and chicory. Then the grasses make a lovely golden foil for the plantings.” 

Thierry adds that one of the things he has learned is that under the harsher, brighter light he needs more intense colours. Michael says the echinaceas do well. When I complain that only the purply pink ones are reliably perennial in my garden, they tell me to try E. Electric Orange or E. Vintage Ruby instead of my much missed E Tomato Soup – as they perform well. Other stalwarts in the border are penstemons, heleniums, asters and tall helianthus. Verbena bonariensis and gauras – especially the white ones – fill spaces with colour, however hot the sun. They’ve been adding grasses to the palette too. 

“We’ve put in lots of roses. We really didn’t grow them much before. But they love the clay. We mix them with perennials. The climbers are fabulous, we were given cuttings from a friend in Duras – they just took off! My bêtes noires are the thistles, they self-seed everywhere. They’re so hard to get out, they’ve such long roots. They even get through weed proof membranes,” Michael says ruefully. 

The gardens are open to the public from April to September. Thierry does workshops, sharing his knowledge and skills. At a plant fair at St-Martin-du-Puy last Autumn they met Susan Lambert on the Open Gardens/Jardins Ouverts stand. This year they held an open day for the association in September and plan to make it an annual event. 

“We very much want to include the village and the wider public,” Michael confides. “Here in Montignac-de-Lauzan we have a thriving community. We have a pub – The Old Lord Raglan. It has frequent music nights. I teach yoga for free. The children from the school come to the garden. The people who come for residential art classes in the big house in the village come and use the garden. We want to welcome everyone.” 

For further details of what’s on and when you can visit, go to the website – information is available in both French and English. Alternatively visit their page on Facebook for seasonal updates and photographs of the garden.