The Castle Garden
Garden art
The garden, whether for pleasure or for utility, is most often linked to a residence, whether a simple house, villa or château, and has been since Antiquity. Bigger or smaller, more or less luxurious, the garden reflects the wealth of the owner of the property and conforms to his or her tastes.
The Renaissance of gardens in France
Since ancient times, gardens have been a showpiece for all those in positions of power. The water, plants and workers needed to create and maintain a garden are luxuries that only those with considerable financial means can afford.
The remains of the Villa Adriana complex give an idea of the extent of ancient gardens, which were confined within the walls of fortresses and monasteries after the fall of the Roman Empire, which maintained a degree of political stability.
Thus, the garden of the Middle Ages was a modest, highly symbolic garden, imbued with a strong religious feeling, protected from the outside by enclosures of woven or masonry plants, which gave it its name of hortus conclusus.
During the Renaissance, Italy encouraged princely and bourgeois residences to look outwards. Defensive walls were lowered, the eye was drawn to the horizon, and the garden became a link between nature and the built environment. France, which came into contact with this new way of building through the Italian Wars, jumped on the bandwagon. The new buildings stood out not only for the lightness and elegance of their architecture, but also for their more complex and ornate gardens. This was the heyday of prestigious châteaux. The Loire Valley in particular, famous for its gentle way of life, was adorned with a string of magnificent châteaux, including Chambord, Azay-le-Rideau, Amboise, Cheverny, Chenonceau and Villandry, which are still the benchmarks in their field today.
The absolute monarchy of divine right and the birth of the French garden
In the seventeenth century, the French garden came into its own thanks to the meeting of two men: Louis XIV, who undoubtedly loved his gardens as much as his châteaux, and André Le Nôtre, whose expertise in garden design benefited from the growing interest in the subject at the time.
Louis XIV, a strategic monarch, understood very early on the role that the garden could play in his domestic and foreign policies. At Versailles, he continued the stylistic evolution initiated at Vaux-le-Vicomte by a team of avant-garde artists, including André Le Nôtre and Charles Le Brun, and commissioned the same artists to create a manifesto for the French garden.
At the foot of and around the château, the visitor’s gaze is drawn to wide terraces, gentle slopes, an infinite central perspective and secondary perspectives, a profusion of ornaments – water mirrors, fountains, flowerbeds, sculptures, trellises – and a Nature ordered according to the laws of reason. Like its predecessors, the garden of the Grand Siècle obeyed the rules of architecture. The novelty lies in the excessiveness, in the integration of infinity and in the treatment of successive levels, making the walk a perpetual discovery. André Le Nôtre’s style proved popular and was exported throughout France and later to all the European courts. Louis XIV’s bid for cultural domination through the garden was won.
A century later, the French garden was falling into disuse. Its rigidity, its treatment of Nature as a control, no longer corresponded to France’s aspirations for freedom. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, English-style gardens, also known as landscape gardens, replaced the French-style gardens.
At the end of the 19th century, the style was revived and many châteaux saw their formal gardens restored, if not identically, then at least in spirit. The landscape gardeners Henri and Achille Duchêne, father and son, were the main architects of the revival of André Le Nôtre’s style, which they followed in his footsteps. Achille Duchêne worked on Vaux-le-Vicomte and Breteuil in particular, returning them to their roots.
