The Landscape Beneath the Garden

There’s something fascinating about travelling through Provence with a group led by garden designer and writer Michael McCoy. After only a few days, you stop seeing gardens as isolated things. They become part of a much bigger landscape – geology, agriculture, climate, architecture, history and food all folded together.

Today started with another private garden by James Basson, and it may have been the clearest expression yet of what makes his work so influential.

At the centre of the property was what had once apparently been a square football field, transformed into a destination landscape. But the striking thing was not the planting itself so much as the absence of conventional garden structure. There were almost no obvious garden beds and very few hard edges. Instead, gravel flowed continuously across the site, with plants emerging directly through it as though they had simply seeded themselves there naturally.

The gravel mulch is not hidden beneath the garden in the way it often is in Australia. It becomes the garden.

Mediterranean shrubs, herbs and perennials drift through the space in loose bands and colonies, softening into one another without borders. Around the house the same language continued – olives, cypresses and drought-tolerant planting dissolving gradually into lawns and open areas rather than being separated by edging or formal boundaries.

It gives the whole landscape an extraordinary calmness. Nothing feels imposed.

James Basson’s remarkable gravel garden in Provence, where planting drifts naturally through stone with almost no visible garden edges.

One sculpture sat separately in its own clearing: a large metallic work depicting goats descending from the wreckage of a ship. Apparently it references local stories of goats arriving in the area following a shipwreck and gradually entering the landscape. The sculpture worked beautifully because it echoed the larger themes of the garden itself – movement, adaptation and the merging of human history with the Mediterranean environment.

The goat sculpture referencing local stories of goats arriving after a shipwreck, blending mythology and landscape.

Afterwards we drove to Domaine de Métifiot for lunch and wine tasting. Looking out across vineyards and olive groves under a deep Provençal blue sky, we were met with one of those very simple but memorable lunches that seem to define travelling in this part of the world.

A long grazing table had been laid out with local cheeses, smallgoods, fresh fruit, breads and other Provençal dishes, accompanied by the winery’s own wines. Nothing overly formal, just generous and relaxed. People wandered back and forward to the table, taking what they wanted, talking, tasting wine and looking out over the landscape.

It felt connected to everything we had seen during the day. The olive groves outside the window, the gravel gardens, the vineyards and the food on the table all belonged to the same climate and culture.

Later in the afternoon we stopped at Saint-Paul de Mausole, the former monastery and psychiatric hospital where Vincent van Gogh spent a year painting. Walking through the grounds after spending the day immersed in Provençal landscapes made the connection immediate. The cypresses, olive trees and hard Mediterranean light that appear in his paintings are still completely present.

It becomes obvious that this landscape has been shaping not only agriculture and gardens for centuries, but art as well.

By the time we returned home, the day felt less like sightseeing and more like a gradual lesson in how deeply place influences culture – right down to the way people garden, farm, cook and paint.