Travelling Masterclass

For the next couple of weeks I’m doing something a little different – travelling through the south of France as part of a garden tour led by Michael McCoy.

There are about twenty of us moving through Provence and the Mediterranean coast looking at gardens, landscapes and the relationship between climate, geology and the way people live. It’s officially about gardens, but I keep finding myself pulled back toward food because here the two seem impossible to separate.

You see it everywhere. Olive groves on limestone hillsides. Kitchen gardens built into dry stony ground. Herbs growing wild through rock walls. Vineyards surviving in conditions that would look impossibly harsh at first glance.

What’s striking is how practical it all is. These landscapes have shaped how people cook for centuries. The ingredients, the planting styles, even the architecture all seem connected back to heat, drought, stone and wind.

As an Australian, it’s hard not to constantly translate these ideas back home. So much of what works here would work in Australian gardens and kitchens too, particularly as we deal with hotter and drier conditions ourselves.

So while Rough Cut Kitchen is supposed to be about food, for a little while it may also become a travelling masterclass in Mediterranean landscapes and gardens – because increasingly I’m convinced they’re really the same conversation.