Preface

On a mild December day in 1994 we took a train from Paris to Cherbourg to see Guillaume Pellerin's collection of garden tools in their natural habitat—his family's home, a stone castle with a panoramic view of the ocean on one of the northernmost tips of France. We expected to be ushered into a museumlike environment, with watering cans, seed boxes, rakes, and cloches set out carefully, ready to be admired as the relics of a craft and culture that is no more. Instead we found a well-lived-in house and tools everywhere: trowels and pruners by the dozens, fruit pickers in baskets, watering cans at the bottom of the stairs, sprayers on shelves in the attic, and shovels and spades crammed into a shed. The bookcase in the library was bursting with seeds and garden catalogs. In one of the bedrooms large advertising posters for fertilizer were lovingly stored flat, some underneath the bed. We found ourselves under the spell of a collection that was a living, changing, growing organism. And a collector who appreciated and knew every item by name.

Guillaume Pellerin's passion for garden tools began when, as a child in Normandy, France, he saw a family friend's array of tools. "They were all so well laid out, so impeccably kept," Pellerin recalled more than thirty-five years later, himself now the proud owner of more than four thousand hand-made tools and one of the most knowledgeable specialists in a field that has long been overlooked.

Pellerin's interest in the tools used to nurture and maintain a garden in inextricably linked to his love for the ten-acre garden that surrounds the Chateau de Vauville, a twelfth-century stone castle on the coast of Normandy, near Cherbourg. The property has been in his family for more than a hundred years. The youngest of seven children, Pellerin, along with his sister Marie-Noelle (she is three years older), "grew up in the garden."

The present garden—created in 1947 by Pellerin's father, Eric, for his mother, Nicole—is a special place. The plants—most of which remain green all year long—came from the Southern hemisphere, and were meant to create the atmosphere of a sunny climate to counteract the region's perennially overcast skies. "It was a garden to dream in," says Pellerin.

As the garden took shape over the years, Pellerin would follow his father around, observing, studying, and appreciating every plant and every tool. After the death of his parents, Pellerin and his sister "were the only ones to speak up for the garden." It was a rather large responsibility to take on, as by then the garden had been registered as a historic landmark, and its rare and unusual plants required year-round attention. "When we decided to take it on, we were either unconscious or in love," says Pellerin. Or both.

Pellerin's collection of tools had grown by that time, too. He had been a collector, probably without knowing it, ever since he was a small boy and enjoyed accompanying his mother to flea markets in Paris. "I see myself holding her hand, stopping to buy something that caught my eye," he recalls.

He understood early on that each tool had its own specific function, and that garden tools were entitled to the same care and respect as the tools of other crafts. "I began to see garden tools as friends, rather than as symbols of hard work," he says.

The moment that galvanized Pellerin's search for old tools was the sight, years ago, of a ship piled high with scrap metal on its way from Normandy to Japan, where the discarded material would be "transformed into Toyotas." Pellerin began energetically frequenting flea markets, foraging through the piles of old metal bits, broken tools, and scrap—all the stuff that "people didn't want anymore"—to come up with his treasures: trowels, spades, dibbers, clippers, and pruners, all remnants of the hand-forged tools, the everyday things, that had once had purposeful lives but had been thrown away or left to rust because they were broken or just not needed anymore. The cut-off date of Pellerin's collection is about 1950, when garden tools became widely mass-produced. "After that there are no more errors or imprints of the human hand," he says. "That's when I lose interest."

In Pellerin's mind, the beauty of garden tools is inseparable from the craft of the gardener who toiled throughout the year, inventing, refining, and adapting the tools that were extensions of his hands, helping him create, mold, and nurture the plantings that were to flourish and become part of the garden landscape. Yet for centuries, the gardener was not accorded the respect that Pellerin believed was his due. "If a person failed at school," he says, "his family brought him home, saying 'Oh never mind, he'll just work in the garden.'" That was all wrong. "Gardening is a craft that requires having a sense of both art and tradition. You can never know enough to make a garden. You have to be a painter to achieve a balanced color palette, a sculptor to discern the volumes, an architect to determine the organization and master plan, and an engineer to figure out the distribution of water without which a garden cannot flourish. But maybe most important, you must be a poet. That's because the garden has to have a soul."

And like the generations of gardeners before you, you will definitely need the right tools.