Vaux le Vicomte

On Saturday I led a guided tour of the fabulous estate at Vaux le Vicomte, southeast of Paris, which was the first commission for André Le Nôtre. These are possibly my favourite gardens in France. What I tried to convey to the visitors was the extraordinary drama and theatre of the design, with its vast, [...]

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Springtime parks in Paris II

Here’s another off-the-beaten-track park to enjoy in this glorious spring sunshine. It’s almost the antithesis of yesterday’s recommendation, which was a small, naturalistic, nineteenth century park in the northwest of Paris. Today’s post is about parc de Sceaux, a vast, geometric, seventeenth century-style landscape, actually just outside the city’s southern perimeter. Laid out in the [...]

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The essence of gardens

Sometimes the most poignant qualities of a site come not from what is actually there, but from what is connected to it, through time and space, by our recollections and hopes. The Poetics of Gardens It is all too easy to think of gardens as consisting simply of physical stuff — of plants and paths, [...]

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Villandry in winter

Villandry has been called ‘the finest potager in the world.’ For much of the year its beds are a mass of vegetables, from soft herbs and jewelled beetroot to blowsy purple cabbages and bright chubby pumpkins, all edged by long, low lines of trained apples and pears. It is a kitchen garden like no other, [...]

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Simple winter pleasures at musée Albert Kahn

A recent post praised the January drabness of two Paris gardens. It seemed to strike something of a chord, so today I offer another place where winter is at her unassuming best. The musée Albert Kahn is a trove of early films and photographs from around the world. Named after the wealthy French banker who [...]

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Potager du Roi: from stinky pond to king’s kitchen

When Louis XIV decided in 1678 that he wanted a potager (kitchen garden) near his palace in Versailles, where he could bring visitors to admire the abundant produce, the site chosen was unpromising marshland, known as l’étang puant, or the stinking pond. Five years of work and perhaps a million francs later, the plot had [...]

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Pre-existing memories of Giverny

An exhibition of Monet’s work opened this week at the Grand Palais. It is the first retrospective of his paintings for around 30 years in Paris, where he remains resolutely unfashionable. His gardens at Giverny, in Normandy, are a major tourist destination. We visited last year and found the little town packed with visitors, all [...]

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Modern heritage with a capital ‘M’

This weekend is Les Journées du Patrimoine, French Heritage Open Days, and one of the buildings involved is Le Corbusier’s masterpiece the Villa Savoye in Poissy, northeast of Paris. We were there last weekend. It is a splendid Modernist building, constructed around 1930 as a weekend home for a wealthy family. By all accounts, it [...]

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The Cheshire Cat at Versailles

From tomorrow, the chateau of Versailles is hosting an exhibition by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. He describes himself as like the Cheshire Cat, guiding the visitor through the wonderland of Versailles with a cheerful smile and a devilish twinkle in his eye. The juxtaposition between the baroque extravagance of Louis XIV’s palace and the bright [...]

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Picardie’s floating market gardens

Last weekend we visited the hortillonnages in Amiens, over 300 hectares of marshland which has for centuries been managed as small garden plots surrounded by canals. There are no roads or paths: the plots are accessible only by flat-bottomed boats called bateaux à cornet. It is amazing to visit. Within a few hundred metres of [...]

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