Florence Farrugia is a pharmacist, the modern equivalent of the apothecary, and her garden in the Lot, on its border with Aveyron, is full of roses including, appropriately enough, the soft mauve pinky red of Rosa gallica – The Apothecary’s Rose.
Florence and her family are from the little village of Frontenac. She had to go to Toulouse and Paris to pursue her studies and when she started work she still felt attached to Lot, bound to the place.
Even when she didn’t actually live there she had land – a terrain – that had been her grandmother’s. It was a field of maize. The house, which they used for snatched weekends and holidays, had no real garden, just a wisteria, so Florence and Thierry, a public servant, began to create one. It slowly grew with no real plan at first.
“We just planted things we loved, in each season, just a bit,” Florence remembers. “Little by little, when we could.”
Time went on and they decided to leave Paris and live full time in the village.
“We wanted a slower pace, to be more in nature, in the countryside,” Florence explains.
She has a pharmacy in Figeac now, not far away, and the one-hectare garden is mature and gloriously full of scent and colour.
“Roses are my passion, I love them. I started with old roses – they are so beautiful – but then I found the David Austin English roses. They are like the old roses but they have the benefit of the repeat flowering.
“I have a lot of multiflora roses: they have a profusion of blooms and they are easy to propagate. We have restored a stone maisonnette (little house) adjacent to our property as a gîte (holiday cottage). There are roses all around it, growing up it, and it is on a voie verte (a former railway turned into a footpath). I have a project in mind to have rose arches all along it. We had our first guests last year, they all want to come back,” she smiles.
Florence will be opening her garden to visitors on June 14 as part of Open Gardens/ Jardins OuvertsFlorence Farrugia
It’s hardly surprising – the cottage is perfect in every detail and impossibly romantic. As with the rest of the garden, the attention to detail is astounding. Everything is exquisitely beautiful. I mention the greenhouse I have seen on Florence’s blog and Instagram.
“I designed it,” she admits modestly. “I got a local blacksmith to make it for me. He had never made anything like it before.”
His skill and Florence’s eye mean that the greenhouse looks like it has always been there, a sense of period and style but a usable space with an important function.
“I need it for propagation,” Florence says. “I participate in the ‘Seeds of Love’ swap every year. I get things which are a little bit different, somewhat rare.”
I suggest they need to be chouchoutés (coddled). She laughs and agrees. Florence takes cuttings too – not just from the roses. She grows many other shrubs and perennials. She mentions callicarpa – its common name is Beautybush. It has super shiny berries – so glossy – in almost Cadbury’s purple.
She has salvias, nigellas, irises, peonies, abutilons and nepetas: plants which are floriferous. The garden is crammed with flowers but this profusion is not jangling. There is calm and harmony.
The garden is on calcareous clay which suits the roses well but wasn’t the best for other plants. “We put in a collection of magnolias, they are lovely but it doesn’t really suit them here,” Florence says wistfully.
The garden is in sections. There is an étang (a large pond) with masses of pink waterlilies and fringed with rushes and grasses.
“I plant using feng shui principles,” Florence explains. “Although it’s far more complex than this, essentially to the west, I have white, lots of white roses. To the east, it’s violets and blues. The south is energy so reds/oranges and tall things. And the north symbolises protection with the wall and more sombre colours, dark green vegetation. In the centre, welcome is represented by white and yellow, with rounded forms and nothing spiky.”
Careful, deliberate placing means that the garden is harmonious and serene. Everything looks like it is meant to be there.
“We have planted quite a few trees. Taxodium, Liquidambar and Parrotia persica – the Persian ironwood tree. I saw that in Berlin, I had to have it. The colour in autumn is fabulous.”
A quick peek at Florence’s Instagram account will show that travel informs her design and planting choices. Influences can come from all over.
Florence enjoys finding new plants and goes to fairs and festivals. It was at one of these, Journées des Plantes de Chantilly, that she met Open Gardens / Jardins Ouverts’s founder, Mick Moat.
“I saw the stand, I talked to him. He’s a very nice man. I felt the aims allied with mine. I support the charities – I work in a healthcare setting. I see these children and their parents. I see them in remission. We have autism in our family. I understand. I wanted to help. I wanted to bring some happiness.”
Florence then began to open her garden and raised extra money from plant sales and refreshments.
However, Florence herself was left in a critical condition after an accident on her bicycle.
“I had to have a splenectomy, my recovery was slow. It was hard as I could not bend down easily,” she remembers.
I say at times like these gardens are both a blessing and a burden – they help you heal but you worry about maintenance. Florence agrees.
Fortunately, though, she is now ready to open the garden again: June 14 will be a significant milestone in her recovery. And this year, Florence is adding music to the garden.
“I went to a concert – the pianist, a music teacher, was playing in a friend's house. I asked if he would come and play in the garden. The garden will open at 14:00 and the concert will be at 17:00. People can come and just pay to visit the garden or they can buy a ticket for the concert too. My mother and my daughter, Sophie, will come to help. We will bake cakes. My mum taught me about gardening – she has an appropriate name, Marie Rose.” Florence smiles.
“She will be bringing plants to sell too – she loves succulents, as well as roses. And she will make some tabliers de jardin (garden aprons) – she is a wonderful seamstress, she goes to a patchwork club. It all helps raise money for the charities.”
Also making an appearance will be the garden’s resident peacock, his jewel-like feathers set off by soft blowsiness of the peonies and roses, billowing behind him. Like everything else in the garden, he will look perfectly placed.
If you want to visit Florence’s garden, find the full details on Open Gardens / Jardins Ouverts’s website. If you used to open your garden for the Association and Florence has inspired you to consider opening again in the future, President Susan Lambert would love to hear from you – please get in touch through the website.
