Borrowed Light

Lately I seem to have fallen into a world of rose gardens and natural beauty. You’d have noticed this if you read my work often. Recently I was drawn to the story of Van Noten and his superb garden in Belgium, and I wanted to write about it. But it wasn’t in France; it was in Belgium. I wondered if I should bother, given that France is the absolute focus of MyFrenchLife™.

Regular readers will know where this goes from here. You know me well enough by now to know that curiosity, and a fair dose of persistence, often get the better of me… so here I go again… digging until that dry gully turned into a rich seam… et voilà.

Here’s what I found, or more specifically, here’s the sentence that started me off. Buried in the middle of a magazine feature on a Belgian garden, in a piece that has nothing, on the face of it, to do with France, is this... The World of Interiors, writing about Dries van Noten and Patrick Vangheluwe’s forty years of coaxing an estate called Ringenhof back to life outside Antwerp, and it describes a July sky as “the colour of Steichen’s delphiniums.” Just one clause really, isn’t it? Most of us would let it drift past, the way we let most captions drift past, on to the next photograph of roses the colour of a bruise healing. I nearly did too, but something about it caused me to pause.

Edward Steichen ran the photography department at Condé Nast for two decades and pretty much invented the fashion photograph. But that wasn’t what stopped me. What I didn’t know until last week was that before all of that Steichen had lived in Voulangis, a village in the Seine-et-Marne, maybe an hour outside Paris, where he became obsessed with breeding delphiniums.

Now this interested me. Steichen moved there in 1908 and was trying to breed a particular blue, one that didn’t yet exist in the genus. By 1913 one of his delphiniums had won a gold medal from the French Horticultural Society. The following year the war forced Steichen and his family to leave France.

And Steichen took the flowers very seriously. Choosing which seedlings to keep was apparently the hardest part. He described the difference as being in colour and texture, something almost impossible to describe unless you could see it. When Steichen talked about how he bred them, he was blunt: “I violated every rule.”

So that explained the odd little reference to “Steichen’s delphiniums” that had started all of this.

But by now I was still poking around Van Noten’s garden, and France kept turning up.

Van Noten’s Roses fragrance collection has another French connection through Revol, the porcelain maker. And what they’ve done with the bottles is just brilliant. Things like the black-and-white animal-print stopper, made from porcelain rather than glass and finished by hand.

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