Rowland Byass – Landscape Architect

Il de Ré

Seaside landscapes always have a powerful and distinct sense of place. Even some miles from the sea, there is a palpable difference in the quality of the light, the sense that just over the horizon, it’s there.

This sense of otherness is even more pronounced on an island, bounded by sea and cut off from the mainland. Il de Ré is connected to the mainland by a 3km long road bridge, but people talk about ‘returning to the Continent’ when you cross the bridge.

The island is roughly 30km long end to end. There’s a constant breeze, stronger on the side facing out into the Atlantic. Along the shoreline, sand dunes protect the island from storms and sea spray.

Inland are salt marshes where salt is evaporated, and inland, fields of potatoes (renowned in France like Jersey Royals in Britain) and vineyards, growing cognac and rosé grapes.

Until the mid twentieth century Il de Ré was a poor, sparsely populated place. Its inhabitants scratched a living out of the poor soil, harvested seafood and extracted salt from the marshes. There are very few substantial buildings that predate the twentieth century, except for the large fort of St Martin, the island’s main town, designed by the famous French military engineer Vauban in the eighteenth century. Since the advent of tourism, this has become a highly desirable holiday home location. It’s exclusive in a very low-key way: there are no vast villas or obvious signs of wealth. Strict planning regulations govern the size and appearance of houses, almost all of which are single storey, and all painted white with pale blue or grey shutters. The result is that despite the large amount of development, the island has a certain visual consistency in its architecture.

An alleyway in Les Portes, one of the villages on the island

The Il de Ré’s beaches are backed by extensive sand dunes. These wind-sculpted shifting mountains of sand give a fascinating snapshot of ecological succession in action. At the edge of the beach, only the toughest wind- and salt-tolerant dune grasses survive. Their extensive root systems enable them to extract moisture from deep below and bind the unstable mass of sand together. A little further inland, other succulents and subshrubs grow in the slightly more sheltered conditions: drought-adapted Euphorbias, pale grey curry plant (Helichrysum italicum) and sea holly (Eryngium). Even further, the higher levels of organic matter from decomposed plants support tough coniferous trees – mainly pines and Monterey cypresses.

The dune landscapes along the shoreline are protected, for very practical reasons. The large masses of the dunes, and the vegetation that holds them together, are the first line of defence from waves and storms battering the island. The plants found here are largely self selecting, consisting of those able to cope with the dessicating winds and sandy substrate. But this is not a pristine ecosystem. Many of the dune-adapted plants actually hail from other regions: yuccas from the beaches of Atlantic North America, Monterey cypresses from the rocky headlands of northern California, and evening primroses from central America, garden escapees now found on dunes and dry waste ground throughout Europe. Apparently there was a fashion for planting the cypresses about thirty years ago, and today there are thousands. They cope well with the sea winds and can grow in pure sand, but look rather straggly when planted in dense stands. When allowed space, they can develop into gnarled and characterful trees, although they probably won’t reach the great age and venerable appearance of their parents

I’ve spent the last three weeks here, working on a seaside garden at the far end of the island. The plot is about a hundred metres long. From the road, a path leads through a small belt of woodland, to the house, and beyond this, a sand bank planted with pine trees that protect the house from the sea beyond. Luckily the house faces east towards the mainland, so that the beach at the end of the garden is sheltered from the worst of the gales the blow in off the Atlantic.

The garden here offers an opportunity to create three distinct landscapes, which can represent, in a stylised way, the distinctive maritime landscapes which can be found here. In the woodland zone from the entrance to the front door, we will augment the existing evergreen cypresses with flowering shrubs which can survive in the shelter of the existing tree canopies: flowering Hydrangeas and Fuschias, and strongly scented shrubs like Osmanthus and Philadelphus. To allow the more water-thirsty flowering shrubs to grow, irrigation will be needed, but this will extend the season of interest and keep things looking fresh in mid- and late- summer, when the house is used as a holiday home.

To one side of the house, a ‘summer garden’ of aromatic shrubs and flowering perennials will be created. This part of the garden is more Mediterranean than Atlantic in inspiration, consisting of the evergreen aromatics that grow wild on Mediterranean hillsides: Rosemary, Lavender, Myrtle and Germander (Teucrium). Amongst these will be flowering perennials that appreciate hot, dry conditions. The intention here is to create something naturalistic in appearance, that requires little or no irrigation. Something between Beth Chatto’s gravel garden in the dry, gravelly soil of Essex, and the late Nicole de Vesian’s refined Provence garden of clipped Mediterranean shrubs. Both these gardens make a virtue of the constraints of their site: dry, free draining soils that will not support masses of lush, herbaceous growth in the manner of an English herbaceous border. Instead, they use tough, drought tolerant shrubs and perennials that will thrive in the conditions. By adapting to the constraints of the site, rather than trying to change it, de Vesian and Chatto created something elusive, that many people strive for but few achieve: gardens that are of the landscape that surrounds them, not imposed upon it. In short, gardens with a sense of place.