In the month of September, as a soft start to my autumn sabbatical, I took a fortnight in Europe to visit new places, old friends and nursery people. I last visited Olivier Filippi and his Jardin Sec near Montpellier in 2019, when researching the planting for the restoration of Delos at Sissinghurst. I’d gone to see his collection of plants for a Mediterranean climate, many of which were originally wild collected and to gain from Olivier’s intimate knowledge about where they grew and what with. In just two days I’d been enlightened enough by such nuanced knowledge to feel confident about the plants we were going to use in Delos, but our conversations also fuelled an internal and ongoing dialogue about the need to understand how we might respond to our changing climate.
I had vowed to get back to the nursery sooner, but in just the short time since my last visit, the changes we had discussed five years ago already feel firmly upon us. The visit this autumn was sobering, for the climate shift that has already gripped this area of Southern France with record-breaking temperatures hitting 45°C in June 2021. The extreme summer heat has continued, cementing the encroaching drought that stretches down into Morocco. Drought that has persisted, with forest fires following the heat and low rainfall preventing the successful germination of endemic species, which are adapted to fire, but need winter rains to grow into the open ground the fire leaves in its wake.
On my arrival that first evening over a late dinner with Olivier and his wife Clara, who is head propagator in the nursery, we started a two-day conversation about change, migration, the need to adapt and the importance of not allowing ourselves to be paralysed by dread of the changing climate. They spoke of the visible shift that they had seen in the garrigue on the high ground near the nursery and in their inevitable response at the coalface of growing for a dry climate. Before bedtime we planned a walk up into the hills the following afternoon to visit the site of a fire which Olivier wanted to photograph for his next book, which is his project for the immediate future. He let me know that, since my last visit, his interest in the garden has shifted. He has started to exercise less control and let it rewild and is paying more attention to which creatures are using the garden and cohabiting in the plant collection.
I had noticed the microscope, identification books and carefully pinned insects in the living room and Olivier explained that he had started to study insects to understand the bigger picture. Which invertebrates were specific to certain plants, and which were happy to roam and be more promiscuous. Knowledge that he said made him realise that, in only looking at plants, we are missing out on an understanding of an entirely bigger world. This will be the subject of another book focussing on the principles of change and our agency to respond as informed plantspeople.
Free to roam the nursery and the garden the next day, I was up early for the best light with my notebook and camera. First wandering around the garden, it took a while for my eyes to attune to the parched conditions of southern France, after the contrast of our verdant Somerset hills, where last winter we had a record wet winter.
The distinctive sculpting and gently undulating forms of the garden were at their best with the low light bouncing off the neighbouring oyster fields in the bay. But it was clear to see that the gardeners’ hand was lighter. The beautiful Bupleurum fruticosum, the shrubby umbellifer native to the region, had begun to seed about and in the paths and breathing spaces between the shrubs, there were seedlings that might have been edited out in the past.
Later in the day, when the light began to change, we walked up into the garrigue in search of the site of the fire and to see how the vegetation was adapting to the changes. Olivier pointed out where the vegetation was demonstrating how it couldn’t cope. Quercus ilex retreating back from their crowns and already showing stag-heading, where trees retreat to become shrubs. He said the week after the first heatwave you could see where branches had literally been torched by the record temperatures. The local Cistus albidus had defoliated in the heat and has since been in decline, these endemic species becoming strangers in their own home, as their ecological niche moves faster than they can. A cistus, with its rattle seedpod and heavy seed, can certainly travel no more than a metre a year. Of course, the plants that are more adaptable, such as shrubby Pistacia lentiscus, have seized the window and Pinus halapensis have begun to dominate, seeding amongst the waning cistus. Pines, which are also highly combustible, are proving to be at odds with how man is managing the land. By not allowing the landscape to burn, a vicious cycle results in a landscape that burns harder and is then unable to regenerate without the replenishment of rains.
We talked about those incoming species, which will initially inhabit these new niches and the time it will take for them to establish a new ecology, which we will need to embrace. We discussed how man will be the inevitable vector for many of these species, both passively (on the wheels of vehicles or shoes, for example) and more actively, the gardener being able to move plants around faster than they can travel themselves. Although controversial this kind of assisted rewilding may be a potential solution to the niche migration which will affect us all – flora, fauna and people – as water becomes scarce and land inhospitable.
As we gathered seed of the lofty Ferula communis subsp. glauca, Olivier talked of his and Clara’s fears for the landscape and their decision to focus positively on what it can become and what will happen in the inevitable change. We talked about the positive role we can have as gardeners, nurserymen and designers. The nursery, for instance, will favour a 60% production of seed-raised plants for their genetic diversity and their potential to produce locally adapted plants, rather than cloning by divisions or cuttings, which will be used for no more than 40%. He talked about his book and all the knowledge as a grower that can be channelled into a positive and informed approach to the crisis. And how knowledge of interdependency and adaptability will ultimately be how we need to manage change. Seeing the future as a challenge, to turn sadness into joy and to accepting change as being the only way forward.
My autumn order from Olivier and Clara arrived earlier this week. Plants that will be worked into my sand garden, a place to reflect and observe and to harness our gardening future with informed knowledge. Perhaps this is but a drop in the ocean, but as a reminder that we must continue to be open and to adapt and to experiment, it is a great place to keep up this important and ongoing dialogue.
Words & photographs: Dan Pearson
Published 16 November 2024
