“I have never experienced anything like this,” says Nicolas Toutain, head gardener at Château de la Bourdaisière, a 70-hectare estate of parks, woodlands and a troubadour-style, neo-Renaissance château in the Touraine region of the Loire Valley. It is a month out from the estate’s annual Festival of Tomatoes and Flavours and he and his team of three full-time gardeners are facing the hottest, driest summer on record, with three heatwaves from June through mid-August and little rain for relief (average rainfall was down 70 per cent nationally in July).
The estate’s kitchen garden, an almost 1-hectare walled plot dating to the 19th century, is home to more than 800 varieties of organically grown heirloom tomato plants, crop-rotated each year alongside other heritage vegetables, herbs and perennials. They come in a range of colours — yellows, reds, purples, greens — and all manner of sizes and shapes, from pear to teardrop. Names range from the familiar (‘Marmande’, ‘Cœur de Bœuf’) to less familiar ones such as ‘Dix doigts de Naples’, ‘Rouge d’Irak’ and ‘Andine Cornue’. It is the most diverse collection in France — recognised as a national collection by the Conservatoire des Collections Végétales Spécialisées.
First held in 1999, the festival attendance has grown from a hundred or so curious locals to a two-day event that welcomes more than 8,000 people. This year’s edition, taking place on September 12-13, will again see stalls selling tomatoes from other local producers (a tonne in total), along with a seed market, garden tours and family-friendly educational activities. The estate’s own harvest for the festival — around 300 to 400kg — is reserved mostly for cooking demonstrations and for the just-inaugurated, on-site 100-seat restaurant La Table du Prince Jardinier.
Toutain has been on the clock since 6.30am — adjusted hours for him and his team to cope with this unprecedented season. This year, the larger fruits have struggled. “Tomatoes usually love the heat, but anything above 35C and they start to suffer and things get complicated,” he says. Many of their flowers have dropped off — a “genetic brake”, because the plant recognises it is too dry to set fruit. For now, the smaller fruits, such as cherry tomatoes, have coped well, as have southern Italian types such as ‘de Calabre’ and the plum-shaped ‘San Marzano’. All seedlings are grown in the glass greenhouse and then transferred to the potager or a series of UV-protected tunnels at the back of the garden — under shade, the plants are better protected.
Planted in the early 1990s, the tomato collection is the passion project of Louis Albert de Broglie, a former financier turned gardener, ecologist and businessman. He took over the estate in 1991 and transformed it into what he calls a “laboratory of living” focused on ecology and biodiversity, introducing organic farming and permaculture techniques. He also turned the château into a charming three-star, 31-room hotel.
Despite severe water shortages in the region, watering this plot has continued thanks to a 19th-century irrigation system and a well-stocked well. De Broglie also has a significant dahlia collection, planted by Louis Benech, which has not fared as well — 200 cultivars were lost in the first May drought — while the rest of the 8 hectares of rolling lawns have been baked to a dusty shade of straw.
“These historic houses that retain their water supply systems, accumulating water during very rainy winters — that is the beauty of surviving resilient ecosystems,” says de Broglie, dressed on a dog-day afternoon in a perfectly pressed yellow kurta (he spent some years in India), linen trousers and bare feet — “always,” he says.
De Broglie is known as Le Prince Jardinier — a name he also uses for his brand of gardening clothes, tools and accessories — and is proprietor of Deyrolle, the upmarket Left Bank cabinet of curiosities specialising in natural history, taxidermy and entomology, dating to 1831.
Tomatoes were an accidental passion. “Funnily enough, there is no real reason,” he says, adding that he became captivated by the endless potential and diversity of their colours, shapes and flavours. “Most growers [in France] had no clue as to the immense diversity of this fruit — at least in the early 1990s,” he says of what he calls his “wonderful journey of discovery”. Since then, he and Toutain have written a book on tomatoes, which was awarded this year’s Redouté Prize; the fruit is also the star attraction of the vegetable and biodiversity garden de Broglie designed for Unesco’s headquarters in Paris and the newish kitchen garden at the Marbella Club in Spain.
“If I had told you 25 years ago that tomatoes were a very important economic issue, you would not have believed me, but this conservatory saves the industry. This collection inspires growers, chefs, amateurs,” he says. “It should be protected, shared and offered up to the world, as the tomato is a universal treasure.”