David’s French Lessons
story by Donna Hecker
David Wagoner’s second trip to France was thirty years in the making. And the first one almost didn’t happen either.
It was early 1994 and David, our staff farmer at Holly Hill Inn, had just met Arwen Donahue, his future wife. A couple months later, he stopped by his family’s Nicholas County farm, now owned by a cousin eager to sell, and fell in love with it, too. But he had an open-ended airline ticket to France, and a job lined up working in the gardens of a 14th century castle.
Conflicted? Definitely.
I was 26 and a lot of things were starting to click. Meeting Arwen, seeing the land. I’d already had this trip in the works and needed to follow through. I needed to get on the plane. It was hard, really hard. I wanted to go but I also wanted to get back and pursue these things that were starting to open up. Finally Arwen had to kind of scoot me along. ‘Go ahead! You made the plan and now you gotta go.’
So go he did, and after a short stint delivering sandwiches by bicycle in Paris, David made his way to Ainay-le-Vieil – a farming village in the Cher department, part of the Centre-Val de Loire region – and practically in the dead center of France.
Once there, David was greeted by royalty, descendants of the castle’s original inhabitants, in his new job at the Château d'Ainay-le-Vieil. It was a little weird.
Obviously they were not my people but within minutes, I had met my people, a couple who lived in the village – Fred and his wife Mary Lou, who was a tour guide at the castle. She knew a little bit of English and was interested in gardening, and I was there to garden and pretty soon, I had been invited to have dinner with them and their young children.
David finished his stint at the castle, came home and got married, bought his cousin’s farm and raised a daughter – while farming and creating a CSA program that included Holly Hill Inn as its first restaurant customer. As Ouita tells it, we were the cleanup operation. Whatever David and Arwen couldn’t sell to their regular customers, or had left over, we would take. Like the potatoes that were traded for dinner one night.
Thirty years came and went. A pandemic happened. The daughter went off to college. It was time to make some changes. We’d long dreamed of expanding our gardening footprint at Holly Hill Inn and Covid forced our hand. David, who’d been helping source local produce for our kitchens, drew up a fresh landscaping blueprint for us. Our chefs, partly idled at the time, started picking out seeds and breaking ground.
As life returned to normal, and the gardens started to expand, David looked around and decided it was time to revisit France.
Getting immersed in projects at Holly HIll Inn and the resultant expansion, I felt I could use some inspiration for our kind of scale with lots of garden elements that are both beautiful and food-producing. At Holly Hill Inn, we have a couple acres of production within a surrounding landscape that has buffers of woodland and farmland, but also residential, and even highway. There are all these different things going on that make it possible to imagine our being a destination spot for more than dining.
So I wanted to see home gardens in France that produced food. And my old friend Fred was the perfect host and tour guide. He’s just passionate about backyard gardening. For him, the backyard garden has very carefully trimmed hedges and he thinks a lot about the design of it. And mixing flowers with herbs with vegetables.
It’s a tight geometry within which things can get messy and he can be spontaneous. And I like gardening that way myself. Toeing the line between order and chaos.
Fred also took David to a nearby medieval town where a swampy area known as a marais had been set aside for variously-sized garden plots.
If you have a home on one of the old medieval streets with no patch of ground to garden, you can go down to the swamp. A maraîcher is someone who grows a vegetable garden, a vegetable grower. Which is what I am – essentially a swamp gardener. The soil in the marais is good but you have to control where the water goes. So there are all these little channels and canals.
In France, David found both old and new ways of doing things. One of the first gardens he visited was one he’d gone to thirty years ago as it was just getting started.
A super passionate gardener there, who was very inspiring to me, had created a new garden on a historic site and now it’s their 30-year anniversary of opening it to the public. In a country full of historical gardens, this one stands out. It’s a newly created garden using medieval techniques. It’s just chock-full of all these incredible sights and ideas.
And in Paris, David saw an elevated park which predates NYC’s High Line Park, and wall and rooftop gardens; and noted a concerted effort to bring more green into the city to help counter ever more frequent heatwaves. As he walked and biked around the city, taking pictures, he wondered what other lessons he could take home.
Like the gardens that surround public buildings in France and what that could mean for Lexington’s own historic courthouse, home to our Zim’s Café. There's such great potential for those lawn areas and if there's a building in Lexington that picks up on the stone monument architecture in France that would be it.
Back home in Kentucky, David’s focus is mostly on Holly Hill Inn for now, with forays out to the other restaurants with the DirtWorks team.
Having gone to France for this concentrated look at what people are doing, it makes me want to take a closer look at home. My friend Fred showed me around to a lot of different examples and now I want to show him around Kentucky.
As more and more of the lawn at Holly Hill Inn becomes garden, David’s own farm is slowly reverting from cropland into woodland, from which he harvests fallen logs and branches and twigs for arches and trellises and other garden elements.
And he’s trying to incorporate those French lessons into a more philosophical approach – laying out the boundaries but leaving room for going with the flow. As evidenced by his reaction to a meandering path created by the laying of a water line out to the vegetable patch.
I had this idea to create a walkway to that garden and then this guy comes in to install a water line and he just kind of went wherever but you know, it’s okay for it to have curves and meander and I’m starting to learn to let things develop organically.
A good lesson for us all.
Related Content
Arwen’s Hippie Salad
Arwen Donahue shares her recipe for this “freaking beautiful” salad made with odds and ends from the garden she tends with her husband (and our staff farmer) David Wagoner at their Three Springs Farm.
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