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Photo by : Allison Harris .
Cardinal Richelieu built the Palais Royal in the heart of Paris almost 400 years ago . Louis XIV live there as a new man , and the Dukes of Orléans yell it home . Today it houses spot of France ’s Ministry of Culture . It is more than just a monumental edifice , then : It is a piece of Gallic history . Yet in 1992 , when the Gallic government decided to reestablish the palace ’s once - notable gardens — which had been a lively Parisian meeting place in the eighteenth and early 19th centuries but had been mostly abandoned in forward-looking times — Culture Minister Jack Lang gave the deputation not to a French designer or landscape painting designer but to Mark Rudkin , a transplanted New Englander with no conventional horticultural breeding .
Rudkin ’s approach was simple : “ I consider , The shape ’s goodness , the proportions are good , but there ’s no piazza for citizenry to walk into the gardens and model down . ” Reviving the basic programme of 1730 , with its threefold line of arc linden trees and its central outpouring , Rudkin add together four plant life - set up paved enclosures surrounded by elevate beds of fragrant annuals — mostly heliotrope and white flowering nicotiana . He also establish park benches , turned to face each other like rear end in a railway compartment — fostering a gumption of connivance among visitors . “ Before I came in , ” says Rudkin , “ no one set foot in the place . Now citizenry who live nearby are beginning to complain about the crowds . ”
If he has no conventional preparation in his choose field of battle , Rudkin is not exactly ego - taught . He grow up on a 125 - acre acres in Fairfield , Connecticut , where , as he puts it , “ we were all very industrial plant - conscious . My forefather had a vast knowledge of trees and shrubs , and my mother did the flower garden , so I was just bring in up in that component . ” ( His mother , Margaret Fogarty Rudkin , also happen to get a business selling house - baked whole - wheat bread and build it into a corporation named after the family ’s estate — Pepperidge Farm . ) His route to professional garden design was just a straightforward one , though . Now in his 70s , Rudkin has led an strange life . As a young man he desire to be a vocalist — before concluding that he did n’t have , “ the correct kind of strait . ” In the early 1950s he hung out with artists like Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko in New York City and developed into an realised painter himself . Then he became entranced by Martha Graham , studied dance with her , and toured Europe with her troupe in 1954 . When the troupe go far in Paris , Rudkin strike in lovemaking with the metropolis and stayed behind when Graham revert to New York .
He pass the next dozen years or so “ hang out ” some more , he says , with people like Cathérine Deneuve , Paloma Picasso , and George Cukor . Then , in 1967 , he bought 6 overgrown acres in Le Mesnil St - Denis , about 20 miles south of Paris , and start building a theater and a painting studio and thinking about a garden . Today , though he live in an apartment in Paris ’s 16th arrondissement , he drives out to his res publica home every daylight .
The house — a low - slung modern building with a kitchen full of copper pans and a living room lined with Miró prints — overlooks what seem to be an untamed woodland , accented by camellias and magniloquent pinkish foxgloves . Nature has had some help , however : A exorbitant gravel route loop down between anthesis shrubs and a intermixture of ad-lib and planted earth cover — primulas , reddish blue , ivy , and cyclamen . Other , almost imperceptible poop paths hoist past spectacular rhododendrons , magnolia , cotoneaster , and cherry tree trees . “ I do n’t get too worried about gardens , ” Rudkin state , “ because I know they ’re always accidental . There were a few camellias and rhododendron on this gradient when I bribe the dimension , for example . When I see how well they were doing , I thought , I ’ll just add more , little by little . That ’s what brought me down the hillside . ” When he first see the field at the bottom , Rudkin recalls , “ it was just dust — brambles , old mattress , bedspring . I cleaned it out and planted thousands of Narcissus pseudonarcissus . ”
The way bear on across the field toward an scuttle in a improbable hornbeam hedge . It ’s a shock to step through the hedge and into a space that is , in burden , a lobby . A leafy corridor leads past a small spring into a series of garden rooms divided by wall of hornbeam and beech . One is a garden full of bloom beds pattern with low , geometrically nip off box . There are exuberant blue and lily-white gardens , and a tilt garden softened with godforsaken strawberries andFritillaria meleagris . “ I put in grown flowering plants that froth and explode and fall to the ground , ” says Rudkin . “ I care to expend large blocks of semblance and not get them all assorted up together like scrambled eggs . ” Another garden is a paved area to display container in summer , while still another reserve only a sixteenth - century stone wellhead surround by gravel . Rudkin ’s divine guidance here , he says , was the garden at Sissinghurst in Kent , the home of Sir Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville - West . “ Everything is round-shouldered , nothing unbent , ” he allege admiringly , “ and yet Nicolson was able to pull in everything together . ”
One friend of Rudkin ’s who admired his garden was Mary Sargent Ladd , the Baroness d’Anglejean , a board member of the Franco - American museum at Château de Blérancourt in Picardy — and in 1989 she give him his first public perpetration , to design a garden at the château . He did this by transforming what had been a veggie patch into two intimate walled garden with great sweeps of color and , appropriately enough , mostly American plant — among them cosmos , dahlias , marigolds , asters , heliotrope , and the works that has become Rudkin ’s theme song , Verbena bonariensis . ( “ You never see it in Paris until I used it at the Palais Royal , ” notes Rudkin , “ and now it ’s everywhere . ” )
Three years subsequently , when American artistry accumulator Daniel Terra founded the Musée d’Art Américain in Giverny , Rudkin was asked to make a garden there , too . The museum , a discreet limestone - clad building terrace into surrounding hill , border fields once painted by Giverny ’s most famous house physician , Claude Monet — so Rudkin left one side of the garden unhedged and turned an adjoining area into a field strewn with poppy . The sure-enough gardens on the museum property were litter with bristling metal frames ; Rudkin converted them into arbors for white wisteria ( “ a polite nod to Monet , who ’s next door ” ) and constructed another serial publication of garden rooms , this meter pack with Nipponese anemones , cosmos , heliotrope , and morning - aureole . Like all his gardens , it is wonderfully popular — approachable , easily pleasurable , filled with fragrant , unostentatious plants .
Rudkin ’s advice to other gardeners is plain and simple : “ Make a list of what grows well in gardens around you and make your garden out of that . If one flora does very well , works more of that , and if another does n’t do well , take it out . ” There is a certain New England dullness to his advice — but Rudkin resists any attempt to see his gardens as a blend of French worldliness and American practicality . “ They come from the experience I ’ve had looking at gardens of all kinds in many nation , ” he articulate . “ I certainly would n’t give them a nationality . ” It ’s surely just a co-occurrence , then , that the tallest flower in the blue garden at Rudkin ’s star sign in Le Mesnil St - Denis is a delphinium developed by another American artist ( albeit by acceptation ) who jazz Europe , Edward Steichen . Its name ? Connecticut Yankee .
