The Road to Le Tholonet : A French Garden Journey

This is not a book about French gardens—it's the story of a man travelling round France, visiting a carefully selected few gardens along the way. Behind every garden lie the human stories: owners and their intrigues, affairs and marriages, feuds and thwarted ambitions, the largely unnamed ordinary gardeners who tend them, wars, plots and natural disasters. Families marry, gardeners are poached, political allegiances are forged and shattered. The human trail crosses from garden to garden, weaving connections across the country.

These gardens sit in their surrounding landscape not as isolated islands but attached umbilically to it, sharing the geology, weather, food, climate, local folklore, accent and cultural identity. Which means wines must be drunk and food tasted, recipes found and compared, the perfect tarte tatin pursued. None of these things can be ignored or separated from the shape and size of parterre, fountain, herbaceous border or potager. From historical gardens like Versailles, Vaux le Vicomte and Courances to the kitchen gardens of Michelin chef Alain Passard, from grand potagers like Villandry and La Prieuré d'Orsan to allotments and back gardens spotted on the way, Monty celebrates the obvious French associations of food and wine.

This is a book filled with stories and information, some of it about French gardens and gardening, but most of it about what makes France unlike anywhere else. It's a book that any visitor to France, whether gardeners or not, will want to read both as a guide and an inspiration—a portal to get under the French cultural skin and to understand the country, in all its huge variety and disparity, a little better.