Making it Grow at the King's Kitchen Garden of Versailles

 

The Potager du Roi was created by Jean Baptiste La Quintinie, a lawyer by training who had a thing for reading ancient texts on horticulture and undertook his own experiments. He acquired a great reputation, working in the most beautiful parks – those of the castles of Rambouillet, Chantilly, Sceaux, or Vaux-le-Vicomte - until Louis XIV called him to Versailles to design and direct the fruit and vegetable garden for the new Palace. 

It took five years, between 1678 and 1683, for La Quintinie to complete the 9-hectare masterpiece, which remains nearly unaltered today. As initially planned, the Grand Square of 3 hectares is composed of sixteen smaller squares surrounded by counter-espalier grown pear trees. It contains about fifty species and varieties of vegetables including traditional vegetables and also condiments, gourds, pear-shaped tomatoes, “kilometer” beans, Jerusalem artichokes or ancient vegetables. The pruning of some 5000 fruit trees requires an extensive number of hours of work to train wall-trees (espaliers) or to fix them on trellises (counter-espaliers, which have replaced La Quintinie’s round-headed trees by the XVIIIth century). 

Regarded as an agricultural theater, the King’s kitchen garden is and has been a place of experimentation. La Quintinie and his successors have mastered the art of producing out of season fruits and vegetables. Thanks to very creative and inventive techniques such as cold frames, bell-glasses and layers of warm manure to protect the productions, the gardeners were able to supply Louis XIV with figs for six months, strawberries in January, peas in April and asparagus in December.  La Quintinie can be considered as a precursor for producing early fruits and vegetables as well as out of season productions, which is common nowadays.

(Adapted from: http://www.potager-du-roi.fr/)

 

Espalier Apple Tree

Early Tomatoes Produced in the Greenhouse

Carrot Variety

Carrot Variety

Cherry Tomatoes

Sweet Pepper Varieties

"I'd rather sweep the beach than weed the courge."

Ornamental and Herb Garden

The Shop where produce, fruits, preserved goods and information is sold to visitors and community members.

Apple, Pear, & Rhubarb Juice

The Backstory

The production within is made possible the same way it always has been, with many hardworking hands. There are maybe 15 full-time gardeners who are composed into the fruit-team, the vegetable-team, and the ornamental-team. These grouping are historic and have created a well rooted hierarchy within garden politics. The vegetable-team is traditionally looked down upon as they (we) work in the dirt on their hands and knees. The fruit-team works standing up and produces the more prized produce like apples, pears, peaches, and figs. Thus in French and English kitchen gardens, they've always been high on the hierarchical ladder. 

The Vegetable Gardeners Headquarters.

Before you get impressed... Most of the time we worked with hoes and small hand-rakes.

Simple beauty.

Waiting for someone to open the lunch-room.

Work Jeans = Art

Melissa and I ate the most salads of our lives.

BBQ on the last day of work for all the gardeners.

Checking Out of France

All of a sudden it's my last few hours in France. Wow that happened fast! I've been living in Versailles for almost 7-weeks now and outside the US for 75 days. My conversational French is where I hoped it would be at this point, however, you have been warned; my English has suffered.

My return flight goes from Orly Airport, Paris to JFK, New York on August 5th. With the time in between then and now, I've come up with a little surprise... I'm going to Poland! I'll finally get to see Jan's hometown of Gdansk as well as Warsaw before my flight back to the US. Despite the stories I've heard from Jan, I'm looking forward to seeing a very different part of the EU.

Before departing on this next leg, I wanted to share a few photos. First the post-card ones, because it's undeniable: Paris is a romantic city.

14 Juillet at the Champs de Mars

14th Juillet at the Champs de Mars

The Tuileries on a Sunny Day

L'Opera

Escargot and Bordeaux

Concert at Saint Chapelle Chapel

Full Moon on the Seine

Aron and Matt, Melissa's friends who came to visit from Maine.

On the French Education System:
In the '80's, a survey went out that showed the majority of French youth did not understand what it was like to work in the field they were academically pursuing. As a result, the French education system instituted mandatory 'stages' or internships built into the entire curriculum, from the beginning of high school through college and professional programs. Every young person in France must work with a organization, company or workplace that is registered to accept stagiers. The amount of time and money associated with each stage depends on your level of education but most range between 2-weeks or 1-month, free to minimum wage, with everyone turning over at the end of the month. We saw two waves of stagiers work at the garden. Each time we watched the the full-time gardeners teach skills and cope with different personalities. It reminded me of the mandatory year of service Obama proposed that was quickly shot down in the US. As you can imagine, it is very a controversial system in France as well.  

At first, life in Versailles was defined mostly around our 8-hour work day in the fields. When our boss inquired as to whether we were okay and why we weren't taking more time off, we decided to expand our definition of 'work' to include reviews at the ENSP, trips to museums, and cultural experiences e.g. shopping at Printemps. I guess the goal of our appointment was more cultural than work-related.Here are some of the parts of what makes Versailles such a landmark for the French.

The Chateau Orangerie

The Grande Trianon

The Petit Trianon

The Potager du Roi

The 4th-Year ENSP Studio

Normandy is for Lovers

Intuitive decisions are the best. In this case, a decision to explore Normandy solo made for one of the best weekends I've had this summer. Like all great lunatics the idea came to me in a dream. The dream was a foggy blur of white cliffs and was loosely based on imaginings of my grandfathers first experience in France at Omaha Beach on June 6th, 1944.
Mind you, I have never traveled alone. Maybe to college visits, for meetings around New York or between cities to meet others, but I have never stayed in a hotel by myself just because I felt like it. I realized this Thursday evening and quickly got to work making plans. By noon on Friday I had a map, a car waiting in Le Havre, a one-way train ticket and a hotel for that night.

Le Havre is a big industrial port for Northern France and it showed. I saw lots of what might have been guido's if they lived in New York and a lot of pavement and docks turned into shopping centers, clubs etc. I think this type of environment is a good place to start a trip.

Mon Voiture

Etretat

Driving along the coast of Normandy you can note a general pattern of cliff/ meadow, beaches/ valleys, and strips of deciduous forests. It's almost impossible not to stop at many of the small towns you come across on the windy road along the coast. Les Grande Dallas has a small beach that seems like a locals only spot and has a great impromptu moules stand. Sotteville has a great restaurant with an inn and old church right across the square. It's a great place to hunker down for the night. I was lucky enough to catch sunset at Phare d'Ailly, which has a great lookout where you can see a good distance along the white cliffs to either side. It reminded me of sunset on Mt. Huashan and why it's good to be alive. 

Due to the availability of water and wind, windmills and nuclear plants are common sites.

Normandy is famous for flower production.

The following day I got up early and made my way through Dieppe and Rouen. Dieppe had an interesting historical museum and lots of restaurants that looked good but being Sunday morning in France, nothing was open. Just south, the City of Rouen has a history that dates back at least 1,000 years. St. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake here. Many impressionists, such as Monet, Renoir and Sisley came here during the Beau Epoche era to work away from the noise of the city. It's easy to see how the landscape could inspire they're work. They were almost being literal. There were also a lot of old churches. Random fact of the moment: I was amazed to find out that 3/4 of the city died in the plague.

What not to do, Dieppe

Notre Dame, Rouen

A livelihood

Church where Joan of Arch was Burned at the Stake

On the drive back from Rouen, I realized that I had yet to jump in the ocean and decided, with the time I had, Etretat was a perfect place to do it. Bless you if you don't know what I'm talking about, but Ponyboy saying, 'Nothing gold can last,' was chiming through my head as I entered Etretat for the second time. Crazy busy. The once poetic path up the cliff to the church resembled an ant-hill. I went for a dip in what must have been 60°F water and got out of town. This is why when you know you have it good don't turn around.

After that it was just a drive back, walk around Le Havre, train to Paris, train to Versailles, walk home kind of evening. After several days, it became evident that Rent-a-Car did not notice there was a nick in one of the hubcaps on the car and I settled back into garden work smoothly.

All in all an amazing trip.