Chaumont ... even in April ... is worth a visit, but will be better with modified expectations. Rather than comparing it to an English flower show, consider it a massive annual festival of modern art, with about half the statements made in concept gardens. Be sure to include the chateau in your visit. But if you really want to see the gardens at their best, plan for high summer. I suspect, like so much in the Loire Valley, the festival is really intended for the flood of tourists who pour into this region in July and August.
Certainly, gardeners with imagination can see how some of these plots will be delightful in a few months. The bouquet-maker's garden, where flowers for cutting will eventually stand in serried ranks between lines of upturned wine bottles, shows promise.
Another garden formed of planted walls ... white flowers on one side, shades of the rainbow on the other, will be spectacular by June. It was also one of the more amusing takes on the year's theme of "Flower Power", evoking the flower children of the hippie generation.
Another light-hearted garden was the Game of Thrones-inspired "Summer is Coming" (check out the type face on the step to the throne, below) where a "throne of flowers" shaped from disused garden tools stood flanked by banners of floral wallpaper. The immature plants in their gravel beds were almost incidental.
Most of the designers, however, were after much grander themes and deeper philosophy. (Chaumont helpfully translates the copious descriptions of the concepts behind every exhibit into English. Many of them will have you rolling your eyes at their intellectual pretentions.) Several gardens riffed on the theme of global warming, with one disturbingly inviting you to imagine a bubbling toxic pool surrounded by the last plants on Earth struggling in pockets to survive.
A radical feminist designer has given us the anti-man witch's garden, which I actually liked better before I read its long diatribe on how men have been stealing power from, and repressing, women for 3,000 years and that this was the garden of a woman fighting to maintain her authority. Not a word about the plants ... or anything creative done with them ... when the theme could have lent itself to all sorts of explorations of medicinal plants, or those traditionally associated with spell casting.
Others, like much of French philosophy, are simply perplexing. Such as the garden where people are encouraged to lie on beds resembling spa chill-out loungers, looking up at the "flower of evil" that supposedly beguiled the imaginary villagers who then ignored their own gardens. Huh?
One great improvement on Chelsea or Hampton Court is that you can actually walk through the gardens, rather than looking at them from behind ropes. That gives some of the concepts a chance to really work. Like the meditation on the power of the gardener, that starts with a wall of seed packets and no flora to be seen. Walk around it and the garden that emerged from the seeds appears.
In another, you wander a path through green, flowerless foliage to enter a mirrored courtyard filled with pink and red wallflowers in glorious bloom, reflected to infinity. Doubly striking because it was one of the few displays showing any real colour this early in the season. (I assume they'll replace with other seasonal blooms as the festival goes on.)
Given the time of year, the nicest gardens were the shade-lovers, dominated by ferns, hosta, bamboo and other greenery that looked good now. (Though the quality of these plants and the poor planting scheme wouldn't make it anywhere near Chelsea.)
Because of that lack of interest on the plant side, the outdoor sculpture and installation art elsewhere at Chaumont was often more impressive than the gardens. Objects ranged from beautiful (a willow-woven lair worthy of Middle-Earth) ...
... to thought provoking (a giant ruin of a classical face inviting the pondering of fallen civilisations)...
... to the unsettling (a giant Jack-and-the-Beanstalk style vine growing through a barn)...
... to the just plain weird (enter a mirrored geodesic dome, recline on a bean bag chair and watch a seemingly drug-fuelled vision of fragmenting natural forms, with new age music).
I feared that carrying the installations into the chateau would ruin my experience of the place (as the preposterous manga exhibit helped to do at Versailles) but they've done it in a tasteful and logical way. Most of the historic rooms have been left to be seen for their own merit, while the majority of the art is shown in un-restored or un-furnished rooms. This has the additional benefit of letting you roam through more of the building, to get a sense of just how big the place actually is. And the spooky, atmospheric attics with their dust and peeling paint, now curated to include "artful" piles of junk with contemporary stained glass, are really quite fun.
Back in the historic rooms, you're getting the benefit of the wealthy owners of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (the prince and princess de Broglie), who restored the place and then turned it into a party palace. One wing shows off their private rooms, densely decorated in that densely-packed, historical revival mash-up so loved at that time.
Historically, Chaumont's richest associations are with Catherine de Medici, who lived here and then forced her husband's former mistress, Diane de Poitier, to exchange it for Chenonceau. The Broglies restored a suite of rooms to reflect this time; it features the usual painted beams, impressive fireplaces, tapestries and heavy, carved wood furniture that characterises the Loire Renaissance interior style. Architectural geeks should come for one significant highlight: a rare, complete majolica floor in the council chamber. Like so many of the Loire chateaux, the authenticity is an illusion. The Broglies brought the floor here after buying it out of a Sicilian palace; but it is typical of what would have been here originally. It's in this room that you'll find a modern art installation that blends in smoothly. An artist who works in sugar has created exotic plants from that material, displayed in glass globes as if it's 1540 and they've just been shipped back from the New World.
The other striking installation is in the chapel, where it appears that a tribe of wood fairies ... perhaps friendly, perhaps malign ... has taken over the space for their own pagan worship, draping it in a spooky network of branches, feathers and stones. It's creepy and beautiful at the same time.
Chaumont's garden festival will, no doubt, be a richer experience in high summer, when the plants have a chance to mature. Though, even then, I see no evidence that it will get close to the quality of planting we're used to at British shows. At that point it will also, inevitably, be a lot more crowded. A distinct advantage of an April visit: I was practically alone. If you do come, include the house and the art installations in the other half of the park, and plan on a whole day. There's too much, and it's far too spread out, to manage in a few hours.
This year's festival, themed "Flower Power" runs until 5 November. Tickets for the chateau and garden (including the festival grounds) are £18 for adults.
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