It doesn’t get any grander than Versailles. Calling it a château (as the French once did) doesn’t do it justice, since it’s one of the world’s greatest palaces; but it has to be the place against which all other châteaux are judged.
And as far as the “garden” is concerned (and to call it just a “garden” is ridiculous in the extreme), they just don’t come any bigger.
When you step out in front of the palace itself (which, by the way, means you avoid the three-hour long queues to tour the insides), the view is so immense it does something similar to what I first experienced at the Grand Canyon. It doesn’t just take your breath away; it makes you laugh at the sheer unbelievability of it all.
Putting it in British terms, this isn’t a big garden, or even a Capability Brown-style naturalist landscape spread over an estate. No, it’s more like a small English county.
The land slopes away, very gently, and contains numerous squares the size of city blocks made up of clipped beech hedges, 5m (20ft) high. The hedges enclose what appear to be small forests. Beyond that there’s what looks like a very long lake.
But as your eyes focus in you realise the banks on either side of the water are dead-straight and parallel, and they go on for what seems like miles.
It’s the Grand Canal, built for triumphal entrances and other majestic goings-on, including in the time of Louis XIV small naval battles when he ordered all the rowing boats replaced with replicas of French naval ships. You can guess whose boat always won!
The canal is flanked on both sides by another set of clipped beech hedges, much higher than those on the slopes, and pruned so straight they look like green high-rise buildings carrying on to the horizon.
But of course, that’s not all. No, that’s just the outlines. Right in front of you, as you stand there at the top of the hill, is a low wall, and beyond that are some of the most amazing floral borders you’ll see anywhere in the world.
And this is where you immediately see a major difference between French gardens and English ones. The French absolutely adore their flowers, but flowers set out in a formal way, and in this case at least they are cared for and dead-headed within an inch of their lives.
The beds at Versailles were easily the best maintained gardens I saw during a three-month pilgrimage to public gardens throughout Europe, and the colour combinations and thoughtful use of plants were a marvel. Not a shrub in sight, and every flower so perfect you could use the display to stock several hundred florist shops.
The shrubs are reserved for the parterres, those small box hedges that are grown and clipped into the amazing forms we associate with French formal gardens. The parterres at Versailles are truly immense, and must be the most famous in the world.
The formality and floral splendour doesn’t extend over the entire landscape, though. If it did, they’d have to employ the equivalent of a good-sized French town to keep everything under control.
What you find instead, as you walk down the hill, is a series of squares (called bosquets), those forests surrounded by the clipped beech hedges. They’re all different, with different layouts and different paths. And you couldn’t call them garden “rooms”. They’re so big they’re like grand halls and rotundas.
The hedges are so high you can’t see the shape of them as they would have been drawn by the designer (Andre le Nôtre). As well, they’re so dense you can’t get more than a glimpse of some of the small forests they encase within.
So you feel like you’re in a formal setting, with everything clipped and controlled, but because of the vastness, the trees surrounding you at every turn, and the rolled-clay paths, it’s also like a walk in the country. You even come away with light brown dust covering your shoes.
But the hedges and walkways are there for a more important reason than to be a fake wilderness. They conceal a whole host of magical wonders. Because more than anything else, Versailles is the triumph of fountains.
There are thirty of them, from fairly small ones to great giants that take up a hectare or more. And they’re all supplied by a set of hydraulics that is basically the same as those originally constructed for the purpose in the late 1600s.
It takes the better part of a day to walk around the whole of Versailles, but the fountains are only turned on for a period of about two hours towards the end of the day.
As a result, there’s a mad rush from one square to another, down alley ways of trees (and more than a few dead ends), as you try to re-trace your steps, hoping to see all the fountains that you’ve seen before, this time in their water-flung glory.
My favourite, for what it’s worth, was the Enceladus Fountain, which depicts the Greek myth of the fall of the Titans, who were buried under Mt. Olympus because they disobeyed Jupiter.
Centre stage is a giant, half-buried under the rocks, that shoots a massive spout of water out of its mouth. Everything about it, including the sculpture, the hydraulics, and the amazing trellised pergolas encircling the fountain, is fantastic.
Another wonderful feature of Versailles, and one that I would love to have discovered in more of the great gardens I visited on the trip, is the music. In Versailles’s glory days as the garden of the Bourbon court there would have been small stringed orchestras playing in the centres of some of the forested squares, so that Baroque tunes would waft through the foliage.
Today the orchestras have been replaced by very well hidden (but obviously very large) stereo speakers. The effect, though, would appear to be very much the same, and you find yourself sometimes actually moving to the beat in a stately cadence as you walk between and through the squares. No doubt Marie Antoinette would have been pleased!
I stayed at Versailles until closing time. It was a wonderful visit to perhaps the most famous garden in the world (it gets 6 million visitors a year!). And as I left, and cast one last long look back down the slope, the following thought occurred to me – say what you like about the French and their sometimes difficult history; they at least had the sense in their revolution to not destroy the splendour that royalty had created.
They said in effect, we paid for all of this, let’s keep it. And so they have, in a wonderfully ornate box, sealed off, not just from the intrusion of the modern, but from even a view of it, down this long concourse and Grand Canal.
After all, what other country would ensure that no factories or office buildings were ever built that could be seen on the horizon of a garden park?
~originally composed in July, 2011~