The garden in October

The first frost came on the ninth this year, a week early. Camille sent a photograph at six in the morning: the chard silvered over, the last of the Marmande tomatoes split on the vine. By the time the van reached the Quai des Célestins, the menu had already changed.

“People think of frost as an ending,” she says, walking the rows in a wool coat older than the garden. “For the brassicas it is the beginning. The cold turns their starch to sugar. The cavolo nero you eat in November is a different plant from the one you would have eaten in September.”

Les Jardins de Sauvage covers two hectares on the edge of the forest at Rambouillet. Camille grows 180 varieties, about a third of them for Lumière alone, and plans each year with Élise over a long lunch every January. They agree on very little in advance except the order in which things will run out.

The split tomatoes did not go to waste. Inès pressed them overnight and froze the clear water into a granité that will sit under the oyster until it runs out, probably by the end of the month. The celeriac, lifted that morning, went straight into its salt crust for the evening.

This is the part of the year Élise likes best. Not abundance, but the narrowing of it: fewer things, each at its peak, each for a week or two. “October tells you what matters,” she says. “It is the month the menu writes itself.”