When it comes to architecture, both indoors and out, the French seem to have perfected “grand”. And nowhere is this more evident than in French châteaux.
I’m still not sure I’ve gotten my head completely around the concept of “châteaux”, but I’ll give it a stab. Using the English terms for such things, châteaux seem to be a cross between castles and great houses. Most of the ones I’ve visited had their beginnings in the 1600s, being built on the falling down bits and pieces of defensive fortifications much older than that.
They reached their heyday in the next century, when many of them were renovated and gilded in a fashion similar to (but probably more extravagant than) English “piles”. But unlike English stately homes, châteaux lost their way (and many of their owners’ heads) at the end of that century, during the French Revolution.
They then seem to have regained their prestige (and new, rich owners) in the 19th century, when not just Paris, but much of France went through a surge of development. Again, though, times got tough, and châteaux often were damaged and lost many of their prized possessions, thanks to the Nazis in the Second World War.
So what we have left in France today are some châteaux still owned by wealthy (but generally no longer aristocratic) families, and others owned by government, either local or national. Alas, however, there doesn’t seem to be any French equivalent to the National Trust.
You can’t visit France and not go to at least a couple of châteaux, and since I’m more than a bit garden-focussed (or maybe as the French say – dèrangè), what follows are my pick of two châteaux with great gardens. In the country of the “grand”, they certainly don’t disappoint.
ooOOoo
Versailles may be the triumph of the fountains (I previously did a whole story on that). But there is another château that has French parterres and “potagers” (gardens with formal shapes like parterres, but using fruits and veg) that I think are even more glorious.
This château, called Villandry, is in the Loire Valley, an area south and west of Paris that must have the largest concentration of grand estates in the entire country. It’s also, quite handily, less than a kilometre from the world-famous cycle route, the Loire à Vélo, so I’ve visited it whenever I’ve cycled past.
As a château, Villandry is in the classic French style so loved (and copied) by Walt Disney. It’s Fantasyland, with a moat and a drawbridge, and several stories of squared stone capped with (how do you describe it? – gapped teeth?) ramparts that you could imagine being used by soldiers in chain-mail when throwing boiling oil down on the enemy.
And of course, the whole place is topped off by big cylindrical turrets, with truly fairytale style, grey-slate roofs; the kind that look for all the world like freshly sharpened pencil ends.
Interestingly, though, while Villandry was built in the same late Medieval/early Renaissance period as many other châteaux, the gardens as they now exist are actually a modern creation.
The château once had significant formal gardens, but as styles changed the new owners in the 1800s replaced them with a far less formal, naturalistic Jardin Anglais style that became all the craze with estate owners back in the late 1700s.
The original style was only resurrected when a Spanish doctor and his American wife, bought the place in the early twentieth century. They used as a guide a landscaping manual written in the 1600s by a French architect, and supplemented it with archaeological excavations.
It sounds like a bit of a hodgepodge, but I can assure you it’s not. For when you walk up a set of stairs and along the “belvedere” (a raised viewing area) that runs along one side of the planted expanse, you’re greeted with one of the most beautiful, colourful, intricate scenes in all of gardening.
There are 20 squares, all connected by walkways, each depicting a different pattern in its hedging, and filled in with a different array of colours, from either flowers (in the parterre), or fruits and vegetables (in the potager).
This is the place, they say, that popularised different-coloured cabbages and silver-beet, and you’ll also find wonders like severely clipped, 600mm (2ft) high apple tree hedges (with really big apples), mass plantings of purple basil, and the contrasting shades of green you can get from different varieties of Buxus.
It’s a marvel to see up close (who knew hundreds of aubergine plants could look so good?), but even more amazing when viewed from up on the belvedere. It’s literally like drawing with hedges, and colouring in with veg.
The parterres are also amazing, but are “painted” with a much bigger brush. The hedges are far broader, and the fill-ins are bright flowers. The parterres in the foreground depict the four kinds of love, ranging from pink for “tender” to bright red for “jealousy”.
Really, to try to describe the garden is almost as difficult as trying to photograph it. The box hedging alone runs to 52km (32 miles)! It’s too big, and there’s just too much detail, to do it justice. The best I can come up with are these four pictures laid end to end that more or less show how wide and amazing the expanse really is:
ooOOoo
With châteaux thick on the ground in France, if you want to pay the bills (wine, cheese and otherwise), you need to carve out your market niche.
One of the more successful, and certainly most interesting attempts in this regard would have to be Chaumont-sur-Loire (by the way, “sur-Loire” just means “on the Loire River”, since like Britain, France has lots of place names that are used repeatedly; in the case of “Chaumont” there are 14 spread throughout the country!).
Chaumont is a nice enough château, and also has very large grounds, although it didn’t have a very well-known garden. Then about 20 years ago someone had a bright idea. Why not stage an international garden competition, along the lines of the Chelsea Garden Show in London and many others? But instead of doing it for only a week, why not keep the gardens right through the season, from April through to October?
It turned out to be a real crowd-pleaser. And given its success, you have to ask yourself why garden designers would even think of allowing their hard work and inspiration (as well as expenditure) to be trucked off so quickly in those other garden shows.
Chaumont has developed a world-wide reputation for showing the cutting-edge of new landscape design and outdoor sculpture, and the year I visited was no exception.
The theme was “the joy of biodiversity” (or at least I think that’s what it meant in French!), and the competition gardens ran the gamut, from the frightening (that’s what happens when you think about a word like “biodiversity”) right through to the sublime.
Almost all of the gardens really made you think. And the best of them were really beautiful as well. Some of our favourites included:
- A veggie garden with great sculptures of mushrooms. However, when you looked at them more closely you realised they were “champignon-composteurs”. The stalks of the mushrooms were made from chicken wire, and included trap doors, so when you had some compost you just opened the door and threw it in. Simple, but inspired, and so much more interesting to look at than big black polyethylene bins.
- A garden of plants grown from bulbs, but with sculptures made from very thin pieces of wood veneer stapled together. They were light and probably wouldn’t last more than a season, but they were almost perfect representations of, well, bulbs.
- A garden by a Chinese designer that used hundreds of long ribbons, suspended from pergolas, and weighted down with small brass bells. As you followed the path through the garden, the ribbons brushed against you, making a soft tinkling sound. But when the wind blew, it stopped you in your tracks, as the ribbons swayed back and forth, accompanied by a much louder sound like very high-pitched church bells.
- A fairly contemporary garden that became magical simply by the addition of hundreds of glass balls hung on fishing lines. The light and cloud were reflected everywhere around you, and the balls played wonderfully in the wind.
- And finally, something that looked from a distance like a miniature war graves cemetery. However, it was only when you came up close that you realised it really was a place of mourning. There were small plaques made of black plastic with white writing, the kind you see with plant names in botanical gardens. Each sign had the common name, botanical name and area of origin.
At the bottom, though, on each one, was the date that particular species became extinct in the wild. Once you caught on, and then looked at row after row of the signs, the sense of sadness actually made you turn away – not quite what you’d expect from a garden, but something you certainly wouldn’t forget any time soon.
~Originally composed in June, 2011~