La Chènevière is a luxury château hotel in Normandy with two on-site restaurants, one holding a Michelin star. I worked as part of an experienced team — alongside a permaculture designer and a specialist agroforestry consultant — designing and implementing productive landscape systems for an estate where the growing and the cooking were in constant conversation.
All production was grown exclusively for the two kitchens. Crop planning was done in direct collaboration with the chefs — a discipline that demanded both horticultural precision and a genuine understanding of how growing decisions translate to what ends up on a plate. But the relationship went further than supply. By trialling and introducing forest garden edibles — sea buckthorn, eleagnus, anise hyssop, lemon balm, and other rarely used culinary plants — we actively influenced what the kitchens were cooking, bringing ingredients to the table that most chefs had never worked with before.
The hedgerow work was among the most distinctive of the project. Existing hedges were thickened and diversified with productive species — chestnut, walnut, apple, pear, and cherry — planted in carefully considered spatial arrangements, including pyramid forms that created genuinely unusual and beautiful productive structure in the landscape. A forest garden was established alongside a new market garden outside the walled garden walls, significantly expanding the estate's growing capacity.
The walled garden itself — historic, beautiful, and meticulously kept — remained the heart of the estate's growing. Working within and beyond it required holding both the aesthetic and productive demands of a world-class hospitality setting.
Growing for a Michelin-starred kitchen sharpens every instinct — for quality, for timing, for the relationship between what the land can give and what a kitchen can do with it.
