Last week’s post about Josephine and the landscape at Malmaison left out any discussion of the plants grown there, so today’s post is going to make up for that, because it was plants that really captured her imagination. That meant, of course, they had to be housed properly. Her dream came true in 1805 with the opening of what was to become the centrepiece of the plant collection. But it was more than that. The new building is thought to have been the largest area of glass yet erected, and it became the ancestor of the grand conservatories of 19thc Europe.
Josephine’s passion went way beyond new and tender exotics that needed hot house conditions. The rest of the gardens were also filled with rarities from every corner of the globe. She became the French equivalent of Joseph Banks and Malmaison the French equivalent of Kew.
It was just about the last thing I expected on a short visit to Montreal last October: a Chinese Garden. In Europe we’ve been used to Chinoiserie for over 300 years but while some examples are genuine imitations [if that makes sense] most are really just, at best, bastardised forms of Chinese architecture and design, whilst at worst they are comical misuses of the form and details…. and none of them are gardens.
I should say at the outset too that I knew nothing about Chinese gardens, and even now I still only know next to nothing. After all, while we have plenty of Japanese gardens in Britain I can’t think of a single Chinese one.
The very word Sissinghurst conjures up the glories of the English garden. It must be the most photographed and written about garden in the country and it’s certainly the most popular of the National Trust’s gardens. In fact it’s been talked about almost since the day Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville West bought the remains of the Tudor castle and began their transformation. As John Sales, the former head of Gardens for the National Trust noted “no garden had greater influence in the second half of the twentieth century.”
I wrote a few months about 
The Garden History Blog 
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