I just spent a morning seeding in a greenhouse with a former air hostess. Five years ago, August Bernstein adjusted passengers’ seat belts on Virgin flights around the world. She is now an avid gardener and she teaches pupils to sow vegetable seeds by hand. She is the head teacher of the gardening school at the pinnacle of culinary prowess, that of Raymond Blanc Manoir aux Quat’Saisons in Great Milton, Oxfordshire.
From doors to handbook, seeds to handbook, Bernstein is a middle-aged convert to gardening. She is the friendliest of teachers, she keeps the momentum of her classes for two hours at a time. For around 80 days a year she leads practice groups, limited to eight or nine pupils who pay from £285 each for sessions such as ‘no dig ground-to-plate’, including lunch and special extras.
I was invited to her day on planting vegetable seeds and I also brought my daughter-in-law Tara. With her family she moved three years ago from London to the countryside, where her heart has always remained. She has built raised beds in the garden and filled them with excellent compost, but in last year’s heat her main summer crop has been zucchini. I went to observe and she went to learn: we ended up learning more than before.
Our class included Mervyn and his daughter Lucy, Tom who had recently sold his business and Felicity who wanted to grow better beets. Chats between customers are encouraged and with a wooden dibble each and a six-pack of pots to take away when planted, we enjoyed each other’s experiences.
We started and finished with guided walks around the vegetable garden. Of the Manoir’s 27 acres of land, one and a half are devoted to vegetables. Under their long experience as head gardener, Anne-Marie Owens, and 11 other staff complete the exquisite cuisine in the Manoir’s dining room. They are grown according to organic principles. Even an acre and a half of flower beds and plastic tunnels can’t meet all of your day-to-day kitchen needs, but herbs and flowers are especially important to what’s being served.
August Bernstein, principal of the Raymond Blanc Gardening School
As their first job each summer morning, the team picks up to 250 zucchini flowers and delivers them indoors so the cooks can fry them, fresh, in batter or stuff them with a skill far beyond my own. The garden symbolizes what Blanc looks for in his ingredients.
I was eager to see how its penetrable garden deals with uninvited wildlife. Rabbits are a problem but are frustrated by the thick garden fleece. About 3 feet tall, it is set around tall bamboo canes, clamped at the top as if they were supporting runner beans. There are leaks, but even in spring the first lettuces seemed to be unmolested by Peter’s four-legged friends.
As the class gained momentum, Bernstein recommended a book that often guides it: that of Charles Dowding No digging (Dorling Kindersley, £30) appeared in September and has far more advice than its title suggests. Like Bernstein and the Manoir Garden, he advises sowing the broad beans until mid-November in today’s warmer autumns.
As sources of seed the Manoir favors Tamar Organics (but not for customers outside the UK), The catalog of royal suits and, for large quantities, wholesalers Mole seeds. Even the garden adheres to the Heritage Seed Library and is one of its seed guardians, collecting seed varieties that the library distributes and holds for currency. You can also join the library.
To help you I have noticed the crops in the flower beds. Blanc beets are the Detroit Globe, the Burpees Golden, the very dark red Bolivar and the pink and white Chioggia striata, excellent grated raw and used in salads. Yellowstone yellow carrot and early harvest Amsterdam are sown under fleece covers. The four main lettuces are dark green oakleaf Clearwater, red Rosalo, Friel, and Celinet. In polytunnels the radishes of choice are French Breakfast, Black Spanish, which can be left in the ground and dug up in the winter, and a great all-rounder, Saxa.
On instruction we had to sow Eleonora bean, an easy start, and then a yellow courgette, Goldy: courgette seeds should be sown upright on the edges, not flat as watering will cause them to rot. I don’t like gardening while supervised, but my cherry tomato planting went well: Jen’s Tangerine is an orange peel variety whose grower lives in the mountains where it gets chilly in the evenings. I wouldn’t have blown a tomato seed, let alone in front of my expert daughter-in-law. The celery seed is finer, but I tapped it from my hand as usual—we were given a special variety with pink, not white, stalks.
We had fun upcycling some cheap shortcuts: yogurt pots with a hole in the bottom instead of store-bought flower pots, or the cardboard tubes in toilet rolls that can be cut in half or three and used as long “pots” for compost and transplanted seedlings. Bernstein even fills recyclable supermarket bags halfway with compost, sows the vegetable seeds, knots the tops of the bags and places them on a tray over his heated radiators. He monitors the growth daily and, at the first signs, opens the sack and weans it off the bottom heat.
An expensive day, you might think, to learn how to save 10 cents on a plate. The ending makes the difference. Dressed in his signature white jacket, the master enters to inspire the pupils, Raymond Blanc himself. It may have been raining but for 40 minutes we had a superb tour de force, covering everything from low wage crime in the restaurant industry to the prospects for his hereditary orchard and his struggles with his vineyard, soon to be planted on a hill with four different types of terrain.
The personal detours became more and more enchanting. Were you of peasant origin, did you reflect? Yes, but a warm hearted farmer. The British really know how to cook, I dared to ask. “At least a couple,” he replied with a smile. What has he personally learned in nearly 40 years in England? “That the English converse, while the French speak to each other, usually several at the same time. And after 39 years, laugh at myself.
In my kitchen bible, Blanc’s Cooking for friends, Maman Blanc pops up often, not least for an elegant chocolate mousse that I know how to cook myself. In the conservatory the son’s thoughts suddenly turned to his father, the model of righteous principles. Once, as a joke, he had made his son taste the earth and had done the same in front of him.
In a finale, which not even Bernstein had ever heard, Blanc amazed us by evoking going to his father’s cellar in winter and seeing, in the light of the single bare bulb, the onions, fruit, potatoes and carrots stacked on trays , with a wine barrel for visitors to the side. “A still life in the cellar,” he recalled.
The FT is written in pink snow and pink champagne and appears on pink paper. If my pink celery grows stalks, I’ll toast the master of the Manoir and the future of his vineyard. One day I may drink it from a bottle of his own sparkling wine, matured in Oxfordshire from Champagne country grapes.
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