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Tiger Tom, Green Zebra and Calabash (Filed: 03/08/2001)

Tomatoes of every shape, size and colour flourish at a French chateau that hosts a festival next month. June Ducas reports

Fruit facts

IN summer, the potager at Château de la Bourdaisière in the Loire valley is heady with the scent of herbs. Warmed by the sun, drifts of sweet marjoram, rosemary, wild thyme, sage, fennel, blue bristly borage and at least 30 different types of basil fill the air.

500 varieties: Prince Louis Albert de Broglie aims to protect ancient and rare species of tomato

Throngs of lilies, shrub roses and lavender add their musky scent. But even more enticing is the mouthwatering smell of 500 species of ripening tomato.

"I can't think of a more simple and perfect pleasure than to eat tomatoes - freshly picked - sprinkled with olive oil and a pinch of salt," says the former banker, Prince Louis Albert de Broglie, who began planting the potager six years ago.

What started as an amateur affair became an obsession, then a business. Soon De Broglie was collecting tomatoes with the ardour of a connoisseur - many of the seeds came from the Terre de Semences seed catalogue. Today, La Bourdaisière's potager is recognised by the Conservatoire des Collections Végétales Specialisées (CCVS) as the pre-eminent collection of tomatoes in France. Next month, the château hosts a two-day Festival of Tomatoes.

Climbing up rustic frames of chestnut wood, the tomatoes come in all forms: oval, elongated, heart- and pear-shaped, spiky, spherical, and ribbed like pumpkins. Some weigh a couple of ounces, others more than two pounds. The rainbow of colours is spectacular: scarlet, orange, green, pink, violet and white.

The names are superbly evocative, too. Double Rich, Golden Treasure, Taxi Yellow, Green Pineapple, White Princess, Brown Flesh, the streaked Green Zebra and Tiger Tom, and the deep purple exotic Calabash.

And it's not just tomatoes. "The aim of the conservatory," says De Broglie, "is to protect not just ancient and rare species of tomato, but also the horticultural heritage of our kitchen gardens. We have 130 varieties of lettuces - brown, blond, red - plus numerous different sorts of cucumbers, cabbages and other vegetables. It's bio-diversity versus uniformity and standardisation."

Digging a kitchen garden might seem an unlikely pastime for a prince who comes from a line of statesmen and academics (including Louis Victor, Duc de Broglie, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1929). A few years ago, friends dubbed the 38-year-old Louis Albert "Le Prince Jardinier". The name stuck and was attached to his exclusive gardenware business, launched in 1996. Le Prince Jardinier now has shops in Paris, Bordeaux and Lille, and its goods are sold worldwide.

But the story of how he became the gardening prince started in the early 1990s, when Louis Albert's brother, Prince Philippe, suggested that they should buy a run-down Renaissance château with 150 acres in the Touraine. The idea was to turn it turn it into a hotel. "I fell under the charm of the château and we bought it 15 days later," says Louis Albert, who abandoned his financial career to manage the project.

The brothers are not alone in having fallen under the spell of La Bourdaisière. Adapted from a 14th-century fortress, it was remodelled in its present form, complete with pointy-roofed fairytale towers, in 1520 by Franois I, for his paramour Marie Gaudin. Later, the beautiful Gabrielle d'Estrees was born there. Aged 20, she became the mistress of King Henri IV of France, whose mad passion for her never dimmed.

Once the brothers had restored and furnished the château, Philippe Maurice took over the administrative side, while Louis Albert embarked on regenerating the neglected grounds. He revived the box parterre in the shape of a fleur-de-lis. "Gardening came to me as an epiphany after living the frenzy of the Eighties," he says.

In contrast to the formal gardens, however, the potager is laid out haphazardly, with beds scattered among grassy paths. Flowers spring up at random between the herbs and tomatoes - bulbous purple Allium giganteum, pale blue convolvulus, Viola tricolor and Melissa officinalis, the lemon balm, which attracts bees.

"I think most people are too far removed from nature," says Louis Albert. "I hope the potager will help them discover that digging the earth is a pleasure that quite simply intensifies the joys of life.'

Fruit facts

The botanical name for the tomato is Lycopersicon lycopersicum or Solanum lycopersicum.

The word "tomato" comes from the Aztec "tomatl". Plants were cultivated by the Incas in the Peruvian Andes as early as 700AD.

Seeds were first brought to Europe by the Conquistadors in the 16th century. Spain, Portugal and Italy promptly took to their flavour.

In France, tomatoes were grown as an ornamental plant until the 18th century. The French thought the fruit had aphrodisiac qualities.

Tomatoes were introduced to England in 1596, but the Elizabethans took its red skin as a sign that the fruit was dangerous. Many members of the Solanum genus are poisonous, including belladonna (deadly nightshade).

In the early 1800s, the Creole people of New Orleans were cooking tomato-enhanced gumbos and jambalayas, and by 1850 the tomato was found across America.

Tomatoes are a good source of vitamins A and C. A substance in tomatoes called lycopene has been found to be twice as effective as beta-carotene at neutralising free radicals, thought to cause cancer.

Chateau de la Bourdaisiere, Montlouis-sur-Loire, is open 9am-7pm until October; call (0033) 2 47 45 16 31. The Tomato Festival runs from September 15-16 and includes advice from the chateau's gardeners, as well as tastings of the countless ways to eat tomatoes. Le Prince Jardinier - for stockists, call 01659 502 82.

Site specifics

www.jardins-et-fleurs.com

www.terredesemences.com

www.hdra.org.uk

www.northerngardening.com

-- Anonymous, August 10, 2001