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In the lush heart of Provence, the co-founder of the Yves Saint Laurent label creates an intriguing, interlocking series of gardens with a sense of theatre.
Louisa Jones - Photographer Michael Paul
Long-time business partners Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé creates two famous garden together in Deauville and Marrakech. Bergé then felt the need for a holiday hideway all his own... and chose Provence in the south of France. He wanted old-fashioned country style and that special Mediterranean rustic refinement, but at a location close enough to town to pick up fresh croissant and newspaper for breakfast.
After much searching, he settled on a series of couryards laid out like dominoes near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. One side, protected by a high wall, gives onto the street while the other blends into wildflower meadows and olive orchard. The main garden covers some 2000 square metres, although the total area, including rough pasture, is roughly three hectares.
Michel Semini, Bergé's garden designer, was born on the Riviera, trained in Paris and now lives in the south. Many of his customers are Parisian fashion and film people who insist on ancient olive trees set in lush lawn flanked with lavender - a vision of Provence that belongs only to advertising and postcards. In this case, however, the dialogue between designer and customer was both more authentic and more original. The men share and admiration for the Islamic traditions of Grenada and North Africa, and both have a strong sense of theatre -
Bergé is a former director of Paris's Opéra Bastille and Semini's garden itineraries always involve a series of scenes revealed. They also share a preerence for the architectural heritage of Mediterranean garden style over the English horticultural mixed border.
The main courtyard of the garden owes its shade to large tree canopies - lime, melia, mulberry and olive. A stone arch leads to the swimming pool, the only really open area on the property, whith its view of the Alpilles mountains.
Twin pavillons here were designed by Hugues Bosc, one as a pool house and the other, beyond a statue of Neptune, as a greenhouse. A secret path leads to an iris walk and the first wildflower meadows, ending in the all-but-hidden Moroccan summerhouse.
Semini's signature appears in the banked and clipped greenery arranged in circles, spheres, lines and cubes, in the raised rings around tree trunks, and in the secret passageways from one part to another. But Bergé's sense of theatre is responsible for the careful staging of certain tableaux, such as the stone deer drinking at a fountain on a carpet of thyme, opposite the house terrace.
Like many Parisians, Bergé mainly comes to Provence for holidays, but instead of depending on oleanders and geraniums for hot-season colour he has devised a more spectacular solution. Each year he transforms the evergreen framwork of his garden, made with cypress, rosemary, box, laurustinus, evergreen oak, cistus and ivy, among other specimens. From October to May it is largely green and architectural but in May, Bergé creates an exotic scene from the arabian nights: citrus, scarlet hibiscus and vibrant bougainvillea suddently appear, already in flower, from the two greenhouse. Dramatically the garden becomes the epitome of suave refinement, like a brillant butterfly taking flight for act two.
Parisian, too, is the garden's air of playful wit. There's nothing minimalist about the joyful clutter with its sense of fun - like table and chairs, all linked with 'branches' made of reinforced concrete, from the days when this was first discovered, modelled to look like wood. Like many holidays-makers in Provence, Bergé enjoys rooting around in junk and antique shops, ceating casual but original effects out of 'nothing'. A ladder climbs into an olive tree - permanently. It is much garden sculpture as the two terracotta doves flying above it.
The speed of this garden's creation was also Parisian: only six months, from January to Juy, were required for the house and pool areas, including the plantation of mature trees in the main court-yard.

At noon on July 31, 1992, despite transport strikes and some unseasonal summer rain, 40 workmen packed up their tools, went off to change their clothes and then gathered in the newly completed garden for champagne and soupe au pistou . The olive orchards and summerhouse came in 1994 and, only recently, Bergé managed to buy neighbour's house and created, in yet another courtyard, a cottage-style garden, with espaliered fruit trees and old-fashioned flowering scrubs.
The garden remains small-scaled ans intimate even in its most open parts; a series of carefully contrived jewel boxes, contents displayed seductively yet with an artfully casual air.
Louisa Jones
'Cartwheel' plantings at the bases of trees are a Michel Semini trademark