Le Potager Extraordinaire

The Extraordinary Vegetable Garden

Throughout the ages, botanical and culinary interest in the magic of squash has motivated people to travel around the world. The visitor will find 13 gardens and several vegetable gardens with novel themes: a collection of solanums, a maize maze, a traditional vegetable garden, a tunnel of gourds, coloured plants and fibre plants, a collection of poisonous plants, the “bizarretum”, aromatic plants, a collection of squashes, an exotic tunnel, a garden of giant plants and a garden of climbing plants.

A walk through the collection of more than 300 kinds of squash is a special sensory experience. The plants found here include the “explosive gherkin”, the oyster-flavoured plant and the tar-smelling plant. From the beginning, the Extraordinary Kitchen Garden has been concerned with revealing the treasures of nature, including all the forgotten, rare and amazing plants which exist: mimosa pudica, mertensia maritima, ecbalium elaterium, jaboroso sativa, trichosantes anguina!

But this unusual vegetable garden also provides the visitor with acoustic delights. “Orion fleur de carotte”, who is a narrator of stories, chose the paths of the Extraordinary Vegetable Garden to scatter stories, legends, children’s rhymes and chit-chat among the people. At dusk, when day ends and night begins, words and plants take on magical dimensions. This lover of words and plants wants the visitor to participate in the origins of the world and the secrets of nature through her wonderful stories. “Moonflower Tales” is an evening gathering, which transports adults and children into the realm of sensuous and magical dreams.

Michel Rialland, who has been a fan of squash since his early childhood, developed the concept of the Extraordinary Vegetable Garden. His story could have begun with “once upon a time”, because Michel Rialland was filled with enthusiasm and inspired by the botanical garden in Nantes, with its “modest” collection of 300 kinds of this wonderful fruit, i.e. pumpkins, water melons, cucumbers and other gourds.

The commune of La Mothe Achard en Vendée was completely enamoured with the idea of this unusual garden and provided the necessary piece of land in 1995. The Extraordinary Vegetable Garden was thus originally born as an association and has since then set itself the task of educating people about the environment and sensitising them to biological diversity of their surroundings.

Nature is manifold, as is the Extraordinary Vegetable Garden with its educational and integrationist goals.