INSPIRATION: Les Quatre Vents, La Malbaie, Québec

The pigeonnier at Quatre Vents is symmetrically framed.  Photo: Daniel Larouche

Francis Cabot

1965, Cabot inherited Les Quatre Vents (the Four Winds), part of the original Fraser Seigneurie beside the St. Lawrence River (zone 4) that had been given to his grandmother as wedding present in 1902. He then turned his attention to developing the 15-hectare spread. His vision was inspired by gardens around the world, such as Vita Sackville-West’s White Garden in Sissinghurst, England, the Pin Mill in Bodnant, Wales, the Taj Mahal in India and Japanese gardens. The garden seamlessly combines elements from these gardens with the original and unexpected to created a composition that has been acclaimed as the most aesthetically satisfying and horticulturally exciting landscape experience in North America, if not the world.

The perennial beds with giant delphiniums love the cool climate.

Interesting stonework appears throughout the garden.

Between 1970 and 2000, Cabot transformed the landscape into a series of alternately grand, charming and intimate garden spaces that drew from decades of visiting gardens and learning from other gardeners. “I think gardens should evoke an emotional response inaddition to one of horticultural interest.” He wanted a garden to acknowledge and respect the larger landscape. A good gardener, he said is “someone who relates the cultivated landscape to the surrounding natural landscape.”

The Moon Bridge. Photo: Virginia Small

“The most interesting people in any community are the most serious gardeners, he found that to be true,” Colin Cabot said of his father.

Rows of giant rhubarb create an interesting pathway.

This little band of musical frogs is hidden in a series of tall arborvitae hedges. Photo: Virginia Small

Cabot incorporated various tricks of landscape design to create inspirational focal points, panoramic vistas and moods. The garden, however,  is not without whimsical and personal touches. Spread among the walkways and stands of delphiniums, numerous varieties of rare primulas, white lilacs and the even rarer Himalayan blue poppy are various pavilions, a Chinese moon bridge, 100-foot-long rope bridge spanning a woodland gorge,  a rotunda drawn from Thomas Jefferson’s work at the University of Virginia, copper musical frogs, as well as a giant mosquito sculpture.

Clipped arborvitae form another symmetrical vista at Quatre Vents.

The Azumaya (contemplation temple), at Les Quatre Vents, Quebec/ Virginia Wieler

“Frank Cabot may best be compared to one of the great eighteenth-century gardeners such as Charles Hamilton, who created Painshill Park in Surrey, or even to Thomas Jefferson, building his classical villa and developing the ‘English’ style in the grounds of Monticello at the turn of the century. Certainly, Cabot has many characteristics of the age of reason. He is part eccentric, part scholar; a thinker, a gatherer of ideas, a plantsman, and a patron. But above all, as is essential to all great gardeners, he is a visionary.” (Penelope Hobhouse, “Scaling New Heights,” Gardens Illustrated, November 1996)

In 2001 Cabot published  The Greater Perfection: The Story of the Gardens at Les Quatre Vents, which was described by The Oxford Companion to the Garden (2006) as “one of the best books ever written about the making of a garden by its creator”. 

Cabot founded, in 1989, the Garden Conservancy, a non-profit organisation based at Cold Spring (his US garden) to help to preserve America’s finest private gardens. Perhaps because of its more extreme climate, Americans do not have the same tradition of gardening as the British. Cabot was interested in trying to “educate the American palate”, to bring what he saw as an art form to the attention of a wider public.

Excerpts from the New York Times