English country gardens once dotted the French Riviera. Now the last of them is about to slip away forever

Many of our richer ancestors in Victorian and Edwardian times had houses in the south of France. That’s where they spent the winter months, arriving in November and leaving after Easter. Their gardens were full of plants that grew at home only in conservatories and glasshouses — mimosa, bougainvillea, jasmine and Tea roses. Some sold up after the First World War and more after 1945, when income tax at 97.5% made it almost impossible to maintain their property in the old manner.

A few stayed on, not obviously in reduced circumstances, but certainly living more modestly than before. I visited some of them for the first time in 1974. There was beautiful Norah Warre, then well into her nineties, who had begun her oh-so-English garden at Roquebrune as a young bride in the 1900s. Nearby, in Menton, lived the botanist Maybud Campbell, whose father had been the doctor to many English patients in search of a cure for tuberculosis. Her garden is now the Jardin botanique exotique de Menton — and well worth visiting still.

I remember that both of them spoke fondly of Humphrey Waterfield, who had been killed in a motor accident in 1971, and wondered what would happen to the gorgeous garden he had made, close to the frontier with Italy, called Le Clos du Peyronnet.

The answer was that Waterfield’s house and garden would be taken on by his young nephew William Waterfield, who proved to be an even greater gardener than his uncle. Waterfield Jnr had read botany at University College, Oxford (followed by a Master’s at Duke University in North Carolina, US), and was already a passionate plantsman. He settled at Le Clos du Peyronnet in 1976, lived there all through the year, unperturbed by the fierce heat of summer, and embellished his uncle’s garden with more than 1,000 different plants, always employed with shape, colour and suitability in mind.

Waterfield was a skilled propagator and cultivator and the success of his plantings began to be noticed. He became the Riviera’s resident expert on every aspect of gardening with plants in the English style. He did not seek renown, but he was always generous with his time and knowledge about plants — happy to give sound advice on how to make and maintain a garden in Provence.

His achievements were recognised in 2007 when he was created a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. There are several orders of merit in France: a gardener or nurseryman might be considered for the Ordre du Mérite agricole, but his award was for ‘Arts et Lettres’, which can only be given to people who have ‘significantly contributed to the enrichment of the French cultural inheritance’.

Waterfield was well known for his willingness to welcome visitors and guide them around his garden. Shortly before he died in 2021, Le Clos du Peyronnet was the subject of a feature in Country Life. The house, a handsome Belle Époque villa from the 1890s, had been bought by Waterfield’s grandparents in 1912 and was to become the last Riviera property continuously owned by the same English family since before the First World War. Waterfield’s death represented not only the loss of a major cultural figure, but a final break with the Riviera’s substantial Victorian and Edwardian English colony.

The spacious house at Le Clos du Peyronnet was clearly impractical for modern living and, over the years, parts have been split off into flats. Waterfield retained the ground floor and almost all the garden, which is now registered and protected as a historic monument. His widow, Judy, had no doubts about the importance of preserving his legacy. Her own garden, La Louve at Bonnieux in the Luberon area of Provence, was the masterpiece of designer Nicole de Vésian. She was a faithful custodian of its heritage, but, earlier this year, she decided, for personal reasons, that she should finally put Le Clos du Peyronnet on the market.

Will the new owner conserve the garden in the way that the Waterfields may have hoped? Will it still be open to visitors on application? We do not know — and the fact that a garden is registered as being of national importance has to be balanced against the rights of an owner to enjoy it in the manner that he or she may wish.

The same is true of historic gardens in England. Judy has been most careful in her search for the right buyer, but past performance is no guide to what may yet obtain. Those of us who have known the Waterfields, their house and their garden, for many years are immensely grateful for their friendship and their sense of responsibility for the future of their garden. We are also aware, all of us, that the sale of Le Clos du Peyronnet represents something very much bigger — the final fading of English Edwardian gardening on the Riviera. It is indeed the end of an era.

Charles Quest-Ritson’s book The Olive Tree (Ediciones El Viso, £50) is out now.

This feature originally appeared in the December 31, 2025 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.