Formal french designs for gardens are usually on such a grand scale that modern gardeners struggle to aply them to their own settings. The nature was force.

But when you see the Château de Brécy nature looks as if she has been happily seduced into submission.

Brecy´s house and garden lie on the site of a former monastic seat for Benedictine monks. In the French Revolution the church and its lands were taken over by the villagers, but survived in gentle decay.

Now, here is a formal French garden, with his geometric form and shrubs. Its formal style is a supreme witness to the classic age of French planning but one of its recent initiatives owes a debt to an English designer´s example.

The design of Karen Rogers at the Royal Horticultural Society´s Hampton Court Palace Flower Show in London was created to demonstrate that a garden can be both edible and elegant. The garden was a wood-burning stove, around which sat box topiary and raised beds of blue-grey-painted wood that were filled with a mixture of flowers, fruit and vegetables.

Flowers such as roses, echinops and sedum grew among good-looking vegetables and herbs sucha as fennel, round-headed leeks, cabbages…

In these eco-friendly and health-conscious times, plucking food from the backyard instead of buying greens that have been flown in from another continent can help your bodies…and the planet.

There is no reason why vegetables cannot be attractive. Either we mix them with non-edible beautiful plants or we use attractive edibles.

In most countries, the ornate kitchen gardens of the past gave way to unattractive rows of vegetables. In recent decades designers have begun to think differently.

Vegetables can be grown in more formats than we might imagine and it is an exiting design prospect to want them as the backbone of the main garden.

It is Genista aetnensis, the Mount Etna broom, from the hot, volcanic Sicilian mountain. No wonder it likes excessive heat and drought. If you visite Mount Etna, you can understand why this plant is such a survivor. The conditions there are dry but surprisingly friendly to the right types of plant life. Genista etnensis is exactly the right type.

Its thin, wiry leaves lose little water and do not need mucho more.

The plants grow up to 15ft tall and erupt into their shower of yellow flowers when the Sicilian summers are starting to hit the heights of heat. No wonder it likes excessive heat and drought.

Its strong orange-yellow flowers are extremely pretty there in early May, which remind you of a Golden Rain firework. An eruption of yellow.

It is simply a great shrub, ideally suited to a warming world and extraordinarily free with its little yellow flowers. Alternatively it will eventually make a tall, widely branched tree, but never so dense that it blocks out the light.