AS A BOY, HE LOVED ANIMALS, imagined himself a cattle farmer, but later, dismayed by the fate meted out to livestock, he turned to horticulture. In the village of Château Palmer, Vincent Le Falher composes exquisite flowerbeds year round. He plants and prunes, he sublimates shape and colour.In the early 2000s Vincent was growing up in Brittany, not far from the ocean, though still surrounded by countryside. All around the family home, with its immense garden, were cattle farmers. “I was constantly outdoors, my greatest pleasure was simply to slip on my boots and just observe nature, the birds in the trees, the frogs in the pond.” Naturally, Vincent was drawn to agricultural studies, specializing in dairy cow management, near Ploërmel. But a first internship at a factory farm was a brutal disappointment. Vincent was shocked by the treatment of the animals, the absence of empathy, for which the farms were clearly paying the price. “It was kind of sink or swim…” Disillusion, a recognition of the absurdity of things, began to grow in him. “In this type of agriculture, it’s all about working as quickly as possible, without ever stopping to understand why. But I like to understand.”

VINCENT FEELS LOST. What he really wants is to be close to nature, work the soil. Perhaps try his mother’s profession and focus on plants. He joins a school of horticulture, near Auray in the south of Brittany, does a vocational baccalaureate in landscaping, followed by an advanced technical degree. Diplomas in hand, Vincent immediately found work at Château de Penhoët in Grand-Champ, the former property of the couturier Karl Lagerfeld. Twenty-five hectares, primarily forest. The owner intended to meticulously restore a classical eighteenth-century garden, with ornamental hedges and lawns. “I worked alone in that garden for eight years. I was asked to create a French-style parterre arrangement of box trees in front of the château – a design incorporating 10,000 trees!” The work was considerable – first the planting, then pruning with shears. Fortunately, there were also citrus trees, a maze to tend, pools to manage. And the forest. In the winter Vincent became a lumberjack, working amidst a host of wildlife.

“I know there will never be chemicals in my garden again.”
Vincent Le Falher — Gardener, Château Palmer

AFTER EIGHT YEARS, Vincent left Château de Penhoët and went off in search of something new in Gironde, his companion’s native region. Contacted in January 2015 by Sabrina Pernet, technical director at Château Palmer, Vincent soon found himself contentedly at work on the estate. “I’m happy because the work here is completely different from what I did before. Here it’s very diverse, and entirely organic. I was sick of working with pesticides. They never even mentioned organics to us in school, neither for agriculture nor landscaping.” Vincent took up his post in a garden sketched, designed and realized by others, but today it’s a garden that he has made his own, which he cares for in his own way. So much so that, quite naturally, he says, “I know there will never be chemicals in my garden again.”

ALONGSIDE THE HOUSES OF THE VILLAGE, perennials flourish – day lilies, peonies, foxgloves, geraniums… “The problem with perennials is they disappear in the winter and reappear in the spring. Yet we’d like to have flowers as much of the year as possible. So we also need very early-blooming plants to bring back some life to the estate.” Bulbs do the job, but also cistus or rock rose, flowering perennial shrubs common in the Mediterranean but difficult to grow on the Atlantic coast. Here, in the vat-house courtyard, some Japanese anemones or showy pink stonecrops, a highly drought-resistant plant. There, pink dwarf gaura, whose flowers are deeply coloured. And also lavender, and cotton lavender. Vincent plays with contrasts in colour and shape. He particularly enjoys growing greenery on walls, to soften a building’s appearance. Here a lovely ivy climbs, there an akebia grows, ready to spill forth its purple, vanilla-scented flowers.

“These perennials with their mix of colours, pinks, violets, it’s unique. The garden was well designed, with depth and relief, and hidden places which you only discover upon exploring. I prune everything with shears, working regularly on the perennials and shrubbery to maintain this elegant but natural appearance. What I liked here was that we didn’t want to manage the plants with hedge-trimmers, which create rounded or squared shapes. Only pruning shears can achieve a natural shape.”

BUT THE BATTLE IS NOT YET WON, as boxwoods have become vectors of disease. To fight the box tree moth Vincent uses Scutello, a preparation made with the Bacillus thuringiensis bacterium, which is sprayed on the foliage. The larvae eating the leaves ingest the bacteria, which block their digestive system. “Also, at La Ferme de Sainte-Marthe, a veritable repository of organic seeds and grains, I found nematodes which act as parasites for the larvae, reproducing inside them before attacking the next ones.” Generally, Vincent believes he has fewer cases of disease in this garden than his colleagues elsewhere. “They treat with chemicals, I let things take their course, and everything turns out well. And when plants are really stricken, sometimes it’s smarter to let them die, remove them, and preserve the healthy plants. Because treating the entire bed can sensitize the healthy plants to the disease. Imbalances result and can spread.”

FACING THE CHÂTEAU, the kitchen garden is the oldest part of it all, predating the floral plantings. A raised garden with square plots, originally filled with simple herbs: sage, savory, tarragon and thyme. But Vincent has been developing it to meet requests by the kitchen team: marshmallow root, helichrysum, hyssop, shiso and oyster plant. Though respectful of everything undertaken over the last ten years in this new Eden, Vincent still tries to innovate. He would like to get by without using growing substrates – mixes of decomposed plants used to rejuvenate lawns – notably peat moss, because of the threat it poses to peat bogs, which constitute rich ecosystems and important carbon sinks. His idea? Invest in a machine which creates little furrows in the lawn like a scarifier while sowing grass seed in the furrows, which are then covered back up by a roller. “We would use neither growing substrate nor lawn sand. Because river sand, which is becoming scarce, must also be preserved.”

AS WELL AS THE PALMER GARDENS, Vincent is driven by a respect for a “global garden,” one that celebrates all animal life… A bucolic green space serving the comestible landscape, which is now planted with at least a thousand trees and bushes standing in what used to be a “desert of vines.” He is the guardian of this brand-new viticultural forest – 830 trees were planted in three days in 2021, a “titanic feat” – filled with apricots, cherries, and apples trees that simultaneously enhance and consolidate the vineyard plots. In the winter, Vincent smears the trunks with cow dung or clay, following in the footsteps of the Elders. In the spring, he watches the flowers bloom and drinks in the spectacle. “I love it, it’s like I’m a kid again.” Just like when he was 14 and would study the birds on the branches and the frogs in the ponds.