Titillation and Chippings. (View).

The garden festival site at Chaumont-sur-Loire is set on hinterland behind chateau and basse-cour. It contains two landscaped walks -- Vallon des Brumes and Sentier des Fers Sauvages--but for the most part is laid out much like a traffic-free suburban housing estate, with permanent trimmed beech enclosures at the end of a series of culs-de-sac to contain the small temporary gardens made for each festival. This year's crop of 25 such gardens were selected from some 450 projects on the theme 'Eroticism in the garden'. (1)

Three of them suggest that Pop Art and the late great Niki de Saint-Phalle are currently enjoying a revival in French art schools. An arbour 'where gardening is bliss' takes the form of a huge abandoned frilly black and red corset encased in gauze and polythene, its ribbons and reinforcement 'invaded by climbing plants' and (in theory at least) by 'numerous red flowers' [Entrelacets by a team from Angers School of Art]; an outsize pair of pudding-pink breasts 'emerging from an ocean of even pinker flowers' (yet to materialize at the time of writing) beyond red-painted ironwork [Eh, tu me soutiens? by another team from Angers School of Art]; and a garden composed of Champagne vines adorned with bags of knobbly gourds, life-size effigies of breasts wrapped in barbed wire, phallic toadstools and other artefacts intended to illustrate that, 'like grapes, women's breasts inebriate body and soul' [Jardin d'Ivresses by a team from Rheims School of Art and Design].

Udder-like clusters of inflated pink rubber gloves and loud intermittent croaking -- perhaps emitted by some of the American bullfrogs currently invading France -- evoke the presence of teeming nature in a bucolic pond setting where flattened patches of straw among reeds suggest recent amorous activities [Le nid des deesses Mappa by Duthoit & Barbier of Hemisphere, France]. Elsewhere, off-white latex gloves, or what is left of them, texture the sides of a 'graphic uterine passage' leading to an inaccessible roofless rotunda. The 'virginal white garden' inside is visible only through sets of funnel-like peep-holes bearing handwritten instructions to shut one eye. So, when fellow visitors do likewise, real pairs of eyes wink back at you between monochrome photomontage panels depicting latter-day wood-nymphs melding with trees [Le Souffle d'Eros by Escavi, De Cockborne, Gailhbaud, Bestieu & Flamerie, France].

The peep-hole device is much employed, to divers ends. Varying degrees of blurred vision are explored in a 'maze going nowhere' composed of irregularly pierced white gauze screens slung between parallel rows of vervaine and other sense-enhancing plants [Fardin flou by Bisbe, Dauge, Aguilar, Magnusson, Tous & Vespasiani, Barcelona]. Laid-back Caribbean good humour is portrayed by a makeshift physic garden full of aphrodisiacs and remedies for impotence, all carefully labelled and guarded by scarecrows, round a bright blue potting shed riddled with keyholes to show stoned garden gnomes snoozing in wheelbarrows and suchlike goings on inside [Jardin cokcain, Tom Thumb's garden party by P.-A. Collin, Bordeaux Academy of Art]. And a much darker side of nature is evoked by a simulated building site where spy-holes in hoardings reveal an urban wasteland strewn with horribly mutilated shop-window dummies [Erotomania/Erotomachia by Orsingher & Bailly, France].

A passing school party made a bee-line for an ingenious tree-house affording views of the Chateau and the Loire across a small cabbage patch [Le nid des ... quoi? by students at Chaumont Conservatoire of parks, gardens and landscape]. Conversely, I was nearly mown down by a three-generation family group beating a hasty retreat from what at first looks like a large, tacky dolls' house on a heap of tarmac. According to the information board, it represents a late eighteenth-century villa built by the Prince of Anhalt-Dessau to house a collection of erotic paintings from Pompeii (displayed in miniature at every window) in a landscape setting resembling an erupting Vesuvius [Villa Hamilton by J.-B. Moirgeat, France].

Other references to the past include sculptural forms inspired by topiary techniques studied at Levens Hall, Cumbria, set amid fractured paths and parterres [Erotica, les chemins de la seduction by Julia Barton, Great Britain]; traditional Genoese pebble-paving techniques deployed to provide textures for visitors to experience with their bare feet [Risseu, le Caillou by Viarrengo & Gelati, Italy]; and a reinterpretation, in plants, of the 'Fantasy Landscape' by Danish designer Verner Panton shown at the 1970 Cologne furniture fair [Green Pliant Phantasy Landscape by Reynes-Dutertre, Delacroix, Dutertre & Debruyn, France].

Two gardens from earlier festivals have been retained and replanted: an essay in dry-stone walling first made to mark the Millennium and now planted with thistles and umbelliferae [Palestine by Marmiroli, France, & Whalid, Palestine] and a mirror-garden featuring a river of colour-differentiated glass chippings [by Barzi, Casares & Co, Argentina].

Weed-smothering chippings, in numerous materials and colours, seem to be one of the festival's specialities. Copious quantities are employed in the temporary gardens and samples are to be found, too, in the Jardin Experimental where ideas from previous years are developed. But titillation and chippings are not everyone's cup of tea and, if muttered grumblings are to be believed, several visiting Frenchwomen could find nothing to fire their imagination.

Instituted to generate new ideas, in the days when Jack Lang was both Culture Minister and Mayor of nearby Blois, the festival now appears to be resting on its laurels. Perhaps it needs a new challenge -- finding ways to humanize the singularly inhospitable pedestrian underpass at the nearest railway station, for example. (2)

(1.) 11th interantional garden festival, Chaumonl-sur-Loire [France], daily, 930am until dusk, until 20 October 2002

(2.) The nearest railway station is liken away, at Onzain, on the apposite bank af tile Loire; there is no lens service.

Photographs by Tuna Mannel.