The Best-Laid Plants

Dramatic tableaux grow verdant in the north of France

Written by Jean Bond Rafferty • Photographed by Laurence Toussaint

Landscape artist Yves Gosse de Gorre's Jardin de Séricourt -- spread out over ten acres in a valley of northern France -- is a tour de force of beautiful perspectives and wonderful plants set in dramatic tableaux. The idea was simply "to give myself pleasure," he admits, "and by that to give pleasure and ideas to others."

Gosse de Gorre is a passionate plantsman (he also owns a nursery), and the garden began in 1985 with "islands of collector's perennials," including Fauvist splashes of coral euphorbia (Griffithii 'Fireglow'), white geranium (Sylvaticum 'Album') and yellow false lupines (Thermopsis lanceolata) among the venerable maples, plane trees and towering pines on an acre-and-a-half plot in back of his 18th-19th-century country house.

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