Our lecturer

The lecture

I discuss a wide range of architecture: the 15C fortified chateau d'Harcourt and the half-timbered manor of Crevecoeur en Auge), the 16C château of St. Germain en Livet and other moated manorhouses,17th century châteaux with their steeply pitched roofs and symmetrical facades (Balleroy, Brecy, Beaumesnil, and Miromesnil) and the Haras du Pin (actually a stud farm built by Colbert for Louis XIV to promote horse breeding in France , and it is still run as such), quirky 19 century seaside villas in Deauville and Trouville built for the rich under the Second Empire, when bathing became fashionable, and an Arts and Crafts house at Varengeville near Dieppe (Le Bois des Moutiers) built by Lutyens with a garden by Jekyll for a Protestant banking family called Mallet, who still own it.

There are some wonderful gardens: formal parterres, great avenues of beech and lime, potagers laid out with fruit, vegetables and flowers and rose gardens stocked with French and English roses. I will look briefly at Monet's achievement at Giverny and lastly two gardens that particularly caught my eye were planted in the 1990s and show with real French flair how great effects can be achieved by the simplest of means.

As I move from coast to countryside, I try to evoke the Normandy immortalised by painters and writers alike - the rich greens of field and forest, the whites of apple blossom and chalk cliffs, the blues of the sea and of fields of flax. I shall show a few slides of paintings by Monet ( e.g.of the sea at Etretat, and of the beach at Trouville) to catch the atmosphere of the coast and landscape.

We will see how Normandy's houses and gardens reflect the region's history, culture and its links with England from the Conquest to the present day.