French Antique Garden Furniture and Planters

As many of you know, I started Louise Hall Decorative back in 2018 with Swedish and French antique furniture in mind, as well as garden antiques.  I wanted to incorporate garden antiques and French garden antiques seemed the most logical, because my husband and I are lucky enough to have a lovely garden which has a bit of a Mediterranean influence to it.  We have a number of olive trees that we have nurtured over time, that we bought originally as standard olives in antique planters to place around our wedding marquee 17 years ago.  We have loved them, pruned them, cut their centres out according to @tuscanpots Robert Moy, garden designer and expert on olive trees based in Oxford, and we of course feed them in the summer with his famous liquid seaweed which is the best around!  We also planted lavender and French bearded irises, not forgetting blue and white agapanthus plants too.  So, really that idea of French garden antiques and furniture sprung from there, as well as honestly trying not to be too competitive with a friend up the road who was selling interior furniture.  On one of my first trips to the south of France hunting for antique garden furniture, I came across two French copper cheese vats, which caused huge excitement, especially after a very tedious journey there, partly by train, during the gilets jaunes protests in France.  I bought one copper vat, too nervous to buy two in one go (but I should have taken the plunge).  That copper vat eventually arrived home with the transport company and I filled it with water and created a simple water feature using a straightforward pump.  Sadly, that vat was stolen a few months later – I naively had it placed on our property in an unsecure spot and it disappeared overnight one night – still my favourite one to this day but I have managed to buy and sell many more over the last few years.  You live and you learn.

Inevitably, as well as finding French antique planters and other French garden antiques such as stone statues, big and small, we all need garden furniture!  Despite our ever-unpredictable English weather, there has been a huge uplift over the last decade in buying garden furniture.  There are of course many garden furniture companies selling modern garden items, whether iron or wooden garden tables, all weather-rattan chairs or beautiful bespoke hand-made tables with wooden bases and stone tops, but there is something so lovely about using antique garden furniture and antique planters in the garden.  I think this can work in both country house gardens or small courtyard gardens – the latter either in the countryside or in town gardens.  On my antique hunts in France, I am always looking out for antique garden tables – wooden tables, or metal-based tables with marble tops – and finding original marble tops is all the better, if not sometimes tricky.  You can incorporate either of those styles with metal chairs – iron 19th century Arras garden chairs can work beautifully as well as other French metal garden chairs.  Some people prefer very pristine metal furniture but I love the look of a weather worn piece of French garden furniture – a little bit of rust and Verdigris adds to the charm.  Of course, all that sort of garden furniture must be sound and in good working condition – wobbles are not helpful! 

I come across both stone, composite stone and iron French planters and urns on my travels, some quite plain and simple and others more intricate and decorative.  Most garden planters I am looking out for are from around the 19th century from French makers but there are plenty of newer ones, rolling into the 20th century that make lovely statements in the garden too.  Ideally, all should have a drainage hole in them as many people like to plant straight into them.

Many villages in the south-west of France where the regions are rich with clay soil, have produced various styles of terracotta, glazed pottery for the garden.

St. Jean de Fos in the Langeuedoc region of France has a long history of producing terracotta pots and planters glazed in various colours with a mid-green being the most popular of colours.  Former factories have been transformed into a museum called Argileum derived from the French word for clay, ‘argile’.

Medici urns

Historically originating from the 15th and 16th centuries in Italy, though inevitably, the first styles dating back to Grecian 4th and 5th centuries, Medici planters and urns come in a variety of styles, some with ornate, curled handles while others are much more upright and with no handles. Many original Medici urns adorn the historic gardens of roman villas and palaces today. 

The style was later copied in the gardens of palaces in France as well as grand country homes.  The Industrial Revolution enabled manufacture on a large scale so it is possible to find many examples of Medici urns from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a variety of sizes, designs, and materials such as cast iron, terracotta and even concrete.  Today, they look wonderful planted with spilling freeform flowers, rosemary and more structured planting in garden design.  Place them on a garden terrace, wall or even position them well in a flower bed.  A pair of urns look equally lovely outside a front door to frame the entrance to your house.

The Biot foundry

18th century Biot olive jars form quite an upright shape and resemble the form of an olive, while nineteenth-century olive jars have a noticeably more bulbous form.  Both are made from terracotta using the ancient rope-thrown method of throwing.  Terracotta from this area is an unusual beige colour. As Biot jars were traditionally used to preserve olives, the rim around the neck of the urns is usually glazed. This prevented olives and oil from seeping into the terracotta. The jar was sealed traditionally with a wooden lid or bouchon – most of those have tended to be lost over time so finding one with a lid would be rare. 

The Biot foundry produced confit pots (confire being the French word for preserving) in glazes, particularly in ochre yellow and the traditional mid-green.  Various foodstuffs would have been preserved in these ‘confit’ jars such as olives, duck fat, grains – where their cool clay allowed for food to last well.  Biot jars are still made today but it’s the ancient 18th and 19th century ones that we try and find as antique decorative items for the home and garden.

Anduze terracotta planters

Ancient Anduze urns from the 18th century and even the 19th century can command huge prices as collectable garden items for traditional homes.  It is rare to find them without any damage – some gentle damage can of course give them a wonderful feel but they can run into thousands of Euros if they are well preserved.  Various makers historically in the region made them out of the traditional rope throwing method of pottery making, around wooden frames and then always finished off with their maker’s personal mark embossed into the clay.  Many colours of glazes were used, but normally featuring a traditional green, grey tones and shades of gentle yellow and ochre hues.

Today, there are still factories in the region producing Anduze planters, mostly by machine method but still in the original shapes and styles with various antiqued glazes.  At Louise Hall Decorative, we can arrange for these to be made for you to order.

Castelnaudary Planters

Glazed green and ochre too, these planters from Castelnaudary generally date to the nineteenth century. Castelnaudary is a commune in the Occitanie region of France (in the area of Languedoc-Roussillon and Midi-Pyrénées).  They can be found with both two handles and three handles, principally with a plain glaze and no other decoration.  They are made with drainage holes which makes them useful for instant planting in the garden or of course they are lovely as decorative items in the home and garden without any planting, but lovely freeform flowers and grasses tumbling over the sides make an attractive addition to your garden design.