There is a small wall in my garden which, if discovered by an archaeologist with a lively imagination, might cause a certain amount of excitement. It is made of stones that look remarkably like bones. Not metaphorical bones of the sort one finds in a poet’s description of a windswept landscape, but proper, ugly, knobbly bones. All stacked together as though a medieval giant has been disassembled and somebody has thoughtfully put the bits aside for later.
I detest it, but also am fascinated by it. The fascination is because it is one of those things which makes an old French garden feel slightly unhinged. Because the French, having spent centuries making gardens neat, symmetrical and obedient, also developed a tremendous fondness for putting bits of the landscape in them that look as though they have escaped from somewhere considerably less respectable. Certainly more macabre. And I detest it because it is simply downright ugly. Honestly, I would prefer it was not in my garden.
Mine sits in the walled garden of my little medieval house. My wee house itself is emphatically not a château. This is worth mentioning because French garden history has a habit of making everything sound as though it belonged to a duke with three hundred gardeners and a troublesome mistress. Mine is a small village house, tucked inside the old town walls, and the garden is equally modest. Yet there, against all expectations, is this curious little collection of stones with holes and hollows and bulbous protrusions. Looking faintly anatomical and faintly prehistoric. It is difficult not to look at it and wonder who first thought, “Yes, excellent, let us build a wall out of these weird looking stones.”
So, When Did the French Start Doing This?
The slightly irritating answer is that nobody appears to have sat down in a particular year and invented the French Bone Wall. There is no convenient document from 1587 announcing the exciting new fashion for constructing masonry from what appear to be the femurs of unfortunate peasants. What we can date is the much larger tradition into which such a wall belongs. It’s the French fascination with rocaille. This is a style of grottoes, strange natural stones and the deliberate creation of landscapes that look as though Nature herself has been allowed to decorate the place. (Though Nature might wish to defer this attribution.)
The roots go back to the late 16th century, during the French Renaissance. During this time the wealthy in France became fascinated by the Italian fashion for artificial grottoes and fantastical gardens. These were not merely caves in the modern sense. They were theatrical constructions in which stone, shells, water, minerals, sculpture and ornament were combined to create something halfway between geology and stage scenery. By the 1580s and 1590s, this taste was already established in elite French gardens. It continued to develop through the early 17th century. The word rocaille itself came into use in the 18th centry. But the habit of making elaborate grottoes and rocky garden features was already well established by then.
The first great styling of gardens came in the 17th century. Particularly from about the 1660s onwards, when Louis XIV’s great transformation of Versailles turned garden-making into something approaching a national competitive sport. André Le Nôtre began laying out the famous groves in the 1660s. These enclosed garden rooms were deliberately designed to surprise. They contained fountains, sculpture, cascades, shells and rocky constructions, all concealed behind greenery until the visitor happened upon them. The effect was not supposed to be “here is a sensible garden feature”. It was more “good heavens, what has just appeared from behind that hedge?”
The First Resurgence -1700s
The fashion did not simply proceed from Versailles in a straight line. During the eighteenth century, garden tastes changed. The rigid geometries of the formal French garden gradually shared the stage with the picturesque, irregular and supposedly natural. By the 1770s and 1780s, the fashion for English-style landscapes of winding paths, artificial rocks, streams and grottoes was well established among fashionable French garden-makers.
Even at Versailles, the change is wonderfully visible. At the Petit Trianon, Marie-Antoinette began transforming the gardens after 1774, creating an Anglo-Oriental landscape of winding water, hills, groves and deliberately picturesque features. The grotto in the English Garden was completed in 1782, built into an artificial rocky landscape through which water flowed. This was the first great resurgence of the rocky garden idea. The object was no longer simply to demonstrate the ordered magnificence of the monarch. Instead, the garden was expected to give the impression of escaping civilisation altogether. Of course, this required quite a lot of civilisation. Somebody had to build the artificial mountain before you could pretend you had stumbled upon it.
The amusing thing is that this new fashion brought the humble odd-shaped stone even closer to the world of ordinary gardens. Once the aesthetic moved away from enormous royal groves towards picturesque country landscapes, a strange piece of limestone became useful precisely because it was strange. A beautiful rectangular block was useful for building. A twisted, perforated, grotesque lump was useful for pretending that your garden had geology.
The Second Resurgence – 1800s
The really spectacular second resurgence arrived in the 19th century, particularly from the 1850s through the 1870s and beyond. This was the great age of the professional rocailleur. This specialist made artificial rocks, grottoes, cascades, rustic bridges and other supposedly ‘natural’ structures.
This was also the age in which progressions in cement changed everything. 19th century artisans could construct enormous artificial rocky landscapes over masonry or metal frameworks. They could then cover them in cement so convincingly that the finished result looked like a geological accident. The rocailleur had become part mason, part sculptor and part extremely determined liar.
Eugène Combaz is a particularly good example. In 1855, he was involved in the construction of the great cascade at the Bois de Boulogne. Here enormous quantities of sandstone were assembled to create a dramatic rocky landscape. Then, in 1867, the newly opened Parc des Buttes-Chaumont displayed a spectacular collection of artificial rocks, grottos, bridges and other rocaille work made using cement over metal frameworks. Combaz subsequently worked on other rocky constructions around Paris and beyond.
This is an important date in the story because it marks the moment when rocaille stopped being merely a charming survival from aristocratic garden culture and became part of the great 19th century obsession with picturesque landscapes. Parks, private gardens, restaurants, spas, railway gardens and fashionable estates could all acquire their own little piece of artificial wilderness. And this wasn’t just a fashion in France.
By the time you have reached the 19th century, a peculiar wall made of natural rocks with holes in them does not seem remotely out of place.
But Were They Actually Trying to Make Them Look Like Bones?
This is where I should put a small caveat in my story. The stones may look like bones, and the resemblance is spectacular. But I should be clear that French gardeners did not deliberately invent a recognised bone looking like wall tradition. There is good evidence for rocaille, for grottoes, for the use of strange stones and for the later professional rocailleur tradition. There is much less evidence for a specific historical fashion called “bone walls” in which gardeners deliberately sought out stones because they resembled femurs and vertebrae. (Though to my mind, I can’t see how they could have thought they looked of anything else.)
The stones themselves are natural, a form of grotesque nature. Limestone is easily dissolved and weathered by water over very long periods. Where the rock contains variations in hardness, composition or structure, water can create hollows, channels, pockets and cavities. Some pieces acquire smooth cylindrical shapes; others develop rounded openings or bulbous masses. One stone looks simply like a weird stone. Six of them look like a jumbled skeleton.
So, Why Do They Look So Horribly Like Bones?
The answer is partly geology, and partly my own unfortunate imagination. The hollows and channels in weathered limestone can produce forms which resemble the architecture of skeletons. Long, rounded pieces resemble long bones. Circular cavities look like sockets. Clusters of lumps can resemble knuckles or vertebrae. Once plants start growing from the holes, the resemblance becomes even more pronounced. Those green rosettes sit in the cavities rather like little living things emerging from an enormous stone skeleton.
This is also why such stones are so useful in gardens. They are full of little pockets. Soil settles into the cavities, roots find shelter, rainwater lingers briefly in the deeper hollows. Perfect for plants that dislike being drowned. Houseleeks, or joubarbes, and various other succulent plants are beautifully suited to this sort of miniature rocky habitat. The stone provides the architecture and the plant provides the decoration. And bonus, the stone has the advantage of requiring considerably less watering. It is an arrangement of almost insulting practicality.
A Tiny Rocaille in a Very Small Garden
This is what makes my own small wall so amusing to me. It has none of the grandeur of Versailles. Nobody has built a cascade over it. There is no mythological grotto hidden behind it containing an alarming marble Apollo. It is simply a small, rather ugly, feature in a walled village garden. Yet it belongs to the same extraordinarily French instinct to take stone, water, plants and the irregularities of nature and arrange them into something that looks, well, supposedly natural.
Perhaps that is why these ugly stones were so appealing. They are not beautiful in the conventional garden-centre sense. They are lumpy, perforated, weather-beaten things. Many of them look as though they have been retrieved from the aftermath of a particularly unsuccessful archaeological dig. But they have character. And sometimes character can be more interesting than beauty.
Making Nature Look Accidental
There is a wonderfully French paradox at the heart of rocaille. The more natural you wanted your garden to appear, the more work somebody had to put into it. The royal gardens required teams of designers, gardeners, masons, sculptors and hydraulic engineers. The 19th century rocailleurs could spend months constructing artificial cliffs and caves out of materials that were not remotely cliffs or caves. And yet the finished result was expected to look accidental.
My little wall, however, seems to have missed the memo. It was presumably intended to look rustic and natural, but it does not look natural in the slightest. The straight stone walls elsewhere in the garden, weathered and softened by centuries of rain, moss and neglect, look infinitely more ancient and at home than this strange, lumpy interruption. Against them, the bone wall positively shouts, “Someone has been messing about.” It looks as though a person collected the ugliest stones they could find, stacked them together with considerable determination, and then stood back expecting everyone to be impressed by how natural it looked.
A Rose by Any Other Name
The curious thing about this peculiar style of wall is that it does not actually have a name. It sits rather anonymously beneath the broad and wonderfully useful umbrella of rocaille. But so do all those grottoes, rocky constructions and all manner of other attempts to make gardens look as though Nature herself had been let loose with some cement and decorative seashells. Nobody, as far as I can discover, thought to give this particular arrangement of peculiar, holey stones its own proper title. So I have decided to do it myself.
From now on, and you may have noticed this already, I shall call it a bone wall. Not because I am suggesting that anyone should rush out and build one. Honestly, why would you? They are quite spectacularly ugly. Rather, because I spent an absurd amount of time trying to find out what this type of wall was. And that time was spent mainly because it did not have a name.
If I call it a bone wall, perhaps the next person curious about it will have a fighting chance of finding out what on earth they are looking at. And who knows? Perhaps bone wall will catch on. I have no desire whatsoever to start a fashion. However, I would quite like if these peculiar little survivors took a more prominent position in history (- if not in the garden).
My Little Skeleton in the Garden
So I shall continue to regard my bone wall with a certain affection. It is a tiny, slightly grotesque descendant of a very old French fascination with the theatrical possibilities of nature. In a country where the grandest gardens were once designed to impress kings, there is something rather satisfying about finding a tiny, ugly echo of that tradition in an ordinary garden. It may have been intended to look natural, but it is gloriously, stubbornly unnatural.
Which, when I think about it, is maybe what this type of garden feature was really meant to do. It should make one wonder who put it there, where the stones came from. And, possibily, why on earth anybody thought that a wall resembling a heap of bones was a good idea.
I have decided that the best thing I can do now is to encourage my own hidden grotto idea. I am planting all sorts of little things in its cavities. I’ll persuade roots into holes and coax plants to cling to the stone. Maybe, eventually, they’ll soften the whole dreadful affair. Given enough time, I hope they will creep over it, fill the sockets and hide its bony lumps. If Nature will not make the wall look natural, perhaps I can simply hide the evidence of the skeleton in my garden.
More Garden Musings
Having a Restoration Garden, eg a wee medieval walled garden that has seen it’s fair share of life’s detritous added into it, it makes for a really fun project. If you would like to read more on my restoration works, house and garden, you will find them in my Restoration Findings.
Or if you wish to read more about gardening itself, there are my Garden Findings (including recipes where appropriate).
If you simply enjoy anything having to do with gardens, or have a friend who does, I hope you will check out the gardening elements in My Shop. Here is a taste below, simply click on an image to see more.
