The front display at this garden gate is not for every one, but it certainly stands out. Gardening clay pots are arranged into “sculpture” of story book characters such as Little Red Riding Hood or the French Becassine. The garden itself, while fairly small, has a nice variety of fruit trees underplanted with flowers and perennials, lavender or roses, and in some areas, bordered by small hedges for traditional French style borders.
French towns and villages often try to outdo one another with their floral displays and borders throughout. One area where they particularly excel is the roundabouts.
Roundabouts are the French version of the intersection, and particularly where the road enter the town, will plant a lavish mini garden in the middle of the roundabout. I wrote about one already that was done as a Japanese rock garden. At each end of the small town of Crozon is a roundabout: the first one is more tropical, the second is paired with a mixed border along the median for a lavish floral display.
Tropical Roundabout:
Floral Roundabout and Border:
If you have ever travelled through a village France and noticed a group of people having a heated discussion looking at balls on a dirt patch, you have seen petanque. It is a very simple game where each player has three metal balls and tries to throw them as closely as possible to the small wooden one called the “cochonnet”. It is usually played in teams, and while the rules are simple, the unevenness of the terrain must be taken into account, and there is skill involved in trying to hit the opponents ball to get it out of the way for example.
This small petanque terrain in Brittany couldn’t want for a more idyllic location, right on the water and surrounded with a small park!
The far end of this property has been is planted with tall trees and has bee turned into a woodland shaded garden accented with statues and still lives, and edged in a bamboo grove transitioning to the rest of the garden. Other plantings such as Japanese maple emphasize the Asian garden feel of this garden.
This garden lies behind the house on a hill up from the waterfront. It has the feel of a tropical retreat with lush banana trees and bamboos offering a lush backdrop for the many perennials such as hydrangeas or roses found in so many Britttany gardens.
Camaret is a small fishing village on the northern coast of Brittany, France, where a mild microclimate in this coastal region allows for an unusually large number of plants to thrive in local gardens.
It is impossible to pass this garden without stopping to admire the extravagant display of annuals, perennials, flowering and foliage shrubs, specimen plants, climbing roses, shrub roses, potted arrangements and water features.
A charming couple owns this house on the northern coast of France, and both are avid gardeners, changing and adding every year new plants, annuals from seed, and cuttings collected from fellow gardeners or just found during walks around the peninsula. They are in the process of redoing the vegetable garden in the back, but part of the front garden is dedicated to a home orchard of fruit trees, apples in several varieties, pears, and plums. Specimen shrubs and palms are underplanted with perennials, and roses are mixed into borders at every turn, or found climbing the walls.
This pleasantly flowered kitchen garden blends vegetable patches with roses and perennial borders and makes this functional space a pleasant retreat to sit and relax as well as work in the kitchen garden.
The owners of this lovely stone cottage in a picturesque fishing village on the Brittany coast in France, spend weekends and summers here. A few fruit trees and vegetables go on the table, and pink oleanders, sunflowers and perennial borders make for a pleasant setting to eat out in the garden.
Planted on a steep hill dropping sharply from the house to the street, this garden packs in a whole lot of greenery in a truly tiny space! The shrubs planted are low maintenance and also hold the soil in place on this slope. They include buddleia davidii, hebe, ceanothus, barberry, juniper and many more. Many are also blooming shrubs that provide color an interest spring through fall, in addition to all the varied foliage colors and shapes making this a charming setting for the house year round.
Globetrotting Gardener 