Today, I am in Paris to lead a 14-day tour of some of the great gardens of France, including Versailles, Villandry, Vaux le Viscount and Monet’s garden at Giverny.
Most of the people on the tour flew with me out of Vancouver yesterday afternoon and arrived here early this morning.
You can follow our exploits on my In the Garden blog at www.vancouversun.com. I will try to file photos and updates every day.
I will also be tweeting whenever the opportunity presents itself. Internet access is sometimes a hit and miss affair in Europe.
We started today by pausing on our way to the hotel near the Champs Elysees to see one of the loveliest rose gardens in Paris – Parc de Bagatelle, which has more than 10,000 roses, as well as a spectacular landscape laid out for a small fortune in breakneck speed back in the 1700s.
This garden is also home to France’s national collection of clematis, but at this time of year it has particularly terrific displays of peonies, irises and masses of spring-flowering bulbs.
I thought it would be the perfect place to have a spectacular garden welcome to Paris in May.
Tomorrow, we start the tour proper with a visit to the famous gardens at Château Vaux le Viscount.
This will be a wonderful introduction to the formal 17th-century landscape style of Andre Le Notre, one of France’s most brilliant garden designers. (He was also responsible for Versailles and Tuileries gardens, among other iconic landmark sites.)
One of the things I’ll be pointing out at Viscount is the superb way that Le Notre created stunning visual effects through the dramatic placement of cascades and fountains and his clever, artistic use of hidden distortions in perspective.
From Viscount, we go to Château Courances to see the 500-year-old “garden of mirrors” on the west side of the Fontainebleau forest.
Viscount is a massive landscape, covering 90 hectares, with a 16th-century castle at its centre. It gets its nickname from the fact that the garden has many pools and ponds that mirror the sky and bring the movement of white clouds to the ground.
My tour is designed so that we have a minimum number of hotel moves; we dip in and out of Paris for the first few days and then skip down to Tours.
The international Jardins, Jardin festival, featuring all the latest and best in European garden design ideas and products, will be on in the Tuileries while we are there. It’s kind of like an informal Chelsea. A bonus.
In Paris, we’ll take time to visit Parc Floral de Vincennes, a favourite with Parisians and a perfect example of what a beautiful public garden should be.
We’ll also being going to Jardin des Plantes, France’s most prestigious botanical garden and Parc Andre Citroen, an ultra-modern, chic garden, brilliantly designed by a team of landscape architects on the site of the Citroen factory in the 1990s.
From Paris, we will head down to the Loire valley to the Tours area, pausing on the way to visit Chartres with its magnificent cathedral.
We’ll start the next day at the world-famous garden of Villandry with its exquisite geometric exactitude and clipped boxwood parterres planted in almost hypnotic patterns.
For a change of pace, we’ll also take in the gardens at La Chatonniere. This series of 12 interconnecting gardens has been described as “a jewelled necklace adorning a pretty woman’s neck”.
Each garden has its own distinct theme: Abundance, Intelligence, Science, Romance, Fragrance, Silence, Delights, Elegance, Senses, Dance, Luxuriance, and the Essence of France.
I am expecting time spent here to have as big an impact on the group as Versailles, Villandry or Giverny.
The owners of Chatonniere say the gardens have the ability to “awaken the senses, evoking feelings of wonder, charm and contemplation.”
At Château Chaumont, we have the lucky timing to take in a special annual international garden event.
Every year, this fairy tale château hosts a display of between 20 and 30 top themed gardens. More than 300 submissions are received from various countries, particularly England, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Japan, but only about 30 are ever accepted.
The theme this year is: Gardens of the Future; the Art of Happy Biodiversity.
I picked this stop partly because I had heard that it is such a great place to see new, creative ways of using plants, as well as all sorts of innovative, even spectacularly avant-garde, landscape design.
We, of course, will taste local wines, such as Sancerre, and there is no better place to do this than while visiting a garden, so we will be dropping into Jardin de Marie in the beautiful village of Neuilly-en-Sancerre.
This will be the opposite experience to the grandeur of Viscount and Villandry – an intimate, small (three-hectare) garden full of enchanting components, including an orchard garden, typical French kitchen garden and graceful pond and white garden.
