Week 17: Caen

Hello and welcome to Helen Alice Johnson Artist in the Garden.

I am Helen and this week I am in Caen. I am in a chateau again, or I am in the grounds of a chateau. This is called the Simples Garden and it is pretty simple! It follows a similar theme to previous gardens I have visited recently; the Chateau de Carrouges and the Chateau de Mayenne, it is more like the Mayenne garden.

I am stood next to a beautiful blossom and also some rather stunning orchids below (I now know these are Bearded Irises and not Orchids - sorry!) They are a real feature in this garden, they are kind of dotted around and I’ll show you in a minute with a little walk around. They will definitely feature in any painting that I do. So let’s go and have a look!

So here are those beautiful orchids (Bearded irises) as we walk around this garden. I’m going to actually take you for a full walk around. You can see that lovely yellow ochre of that church in the background that kind of matches the paths and compliments really well with the purple of the orchids (Bearded Irises) and the other purple flowers that are in here. As I’ve said, it’s a formal garden in terms of it’s shapes. It’s got square beds, some sort of hexagonal type arrangement going on where the orchids are here. Another example of a blossom that has gone - finished. More yellow. That bench there that we have just walked past, I sat and did a drawing from, which I will show you at some point in this video. That lovely yellow ochre again of that building in the background and it makes everything really soft - similar to the Mayenne garden from last week. Bluebells - that spikey thing that keeps reappearing - I still don’t know what it is. If anyone wants to let me know that that would be great! (Thanks to Lucie and Ian I now know this is a Cardoon!)

Moving round here - more purple. It’s still very early in the year so a lot of these plants aren’t yet in flower but you get the idea of the shapes. Even the stuff that they’ve put in the beds - the wood chippings matches that lovely yellow colour. Its kind of like a mixture between a yellow ochre and a Naples yellow. Naples Yellow being one of my favourite colours - it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s a real soft colour but still manages to have a real vibrancy to it. So walking up here to the end, more of the orchids (Bearded Irises). As I say, they are dotted about all over and there’s a picture on this video later on of Vangogh’s ‘Blue Orchids’ that I will show you. Georgia O Keefe also painted a lot of orchids. It’s a beautiful plant, very exotic and flamboyant - so it will be interesting to see what I do with those in terms of this painting. There’s some more blossom there. I quite like the way that forms a sort of fence if you like between the beds and the path. So, yes, lots to see. We’re coming to the end now of the walk around. There’s a bit of the rambling rosemary, similar to the one last week in Mayenne. Coming to the end of that and back round to finish off with those beautiful orchids (Bearded Irises!)

Thank you Chateau de Caen.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed that walk around. You’ll have seen all the orchids (Bearded Irises) and also the bluebells and some other flowers that I don’t quite recognise but they are also purple! and so there is clearly a purple theme going on here and yet again those formal shapes of the squares of the beds and the way that the plants are categorised into quite formal kind of areas and the trees that dot in the middle of those grid shapes. So it will be that kind of painting again. I’m really looking forward to painting it. Orchids (and Bearded Irises even!) have been painted throughout history by artists in gardens and look absolutely brilliant so I am really looking forward to painting those and I hope that you will follow the progress on Saturday in the Studio and also follow me for a garden somewhere next week - probably back in the UK. You might have noticed a pattern that we are heading further north and this week’s Caen. So thanks ever so much and I hope to see you next week.