From: © 2005 L'Atelier Vert - - Everything French Gardening®
Villandry is best known, at least abroad, as France's archetypal potager, a kitchen garden elevated to a regal plain and Frenchified to the maximum, with its seemingly endless geometric parterres edged in immaculately clipped boxwood. This, at least, is the impression I had of the garden before I visited.
In fact, the potager forms only part of what in fact is a painstaking and loving restoration of the gardens of a Renaissance château, fraught with romantic symbolism and amenities--or agréments, as the French would call them, features designed for pure pleasure. The potager, for example, is punctuated with numerous latticework gloriettes, or gazebos, whose curved form provide great intimacy to those within as they gaze upon the softly splashing fountain before them. The moment I saw them, I thought of them as lovers' bowers. Was it just the influence of all those erotic gardens I'd seen the day before at Chaumont-sur-Loire?
I don't think so. To understand and appreciate these gardens, you have to know their history and the symbolism behind their design. Villandry was completed in 1536, by Jean le Breton, one of King François I's finance ministers. Le Breton had also been ambassador to Italy, where he had devoted his spare time to study of the Italian Renaissance garden. Anyone who has been to Florence will instantly recognize this influence in the grounds of Villandry.
Le Breton razed the old castle that had occupied the site of the present château, conserving only the old towers visible in the main photo, where on July4, 1189, the Paix des Colombiers was signed, wherein King Henry II Plantagenet of England acknowledged defeat by King Philippe Auguste of France.
Villandry remained in Le Breton's family until 1754, when it passed into the hands of the Marquis de Castellane, a powerful ambassador from a family of nobles from Provence. He constructed the beautiful outbuildings around the château, and redesigned its interior to bring it up to 18th century standards of comfort. The traditional Renaissance-style gardens were destroyed in the 19th century to create an English-style landscape park not dissimilar to Parc Monceau, which is just at the end of my block.
By the turn of the century, Villandry had fallen into terrible disrepair and was on the brink of being demolished. It was rescued in 1906 by Dr. Joachim Carvallo, born in Spain and the great-grandfather of the present owners. Abandoning a brilliant scientific career to devote himself to the restoration of Villandry, it was he who recreated the gardens we view today, which are in complete harmony with the Renaissance architecture of the château and with the very spirit of the Renaissance itself.
Even the potager is full of symbolism. The kitchen garden is medieval in origin, dating from the gardens cultivated by monks and nuns to provide food for the inhabitants of the abbeys and flowers for its altars. The many crosses in the potager of Villandry remind us of the monastic origins of the geometric kitchen garden. Monks traditionally planted rose standards (tree roses) in the kitchen gardens of the abbeys, thus the origins of the flowering French potager. At Villandry today, the rose standards are planted geometrically, representing the monks working their patches of vegetables. The gardens are planted in a rotation of more than 40 types of vegetables, arranged with regard to color, form, and companion planting rules.
Italy was the second major influence on the French kitchen garden. Especially from the region of Florence came the idea to add flower beds, bowers, fountains, and other ornaments, such as the stone urn at right, whose overflowing contents of fruit and vegetables symbolize the abundance of the garden. This Italianate style of decoration became firmly entrenched throughout France. In fact, this style of work is still being produced by a few small ateliers devoted to traditional decoration. (Our ceramics listed below are perfect exemplars of this tradition.)
Most easily recognizable are the perfect hearts of 'Tender Love,' at right, perhaps love in its most ideal form, at least by Renaissance standards. In fact, it is interesting to reflect on the heart-shape itself, which appears as two halves of a whole, perfectly joined and reflecting each other. However, this serene state of affairs changes in the adjacent quadrangle, 'Passionate Love,' at left. Here, the formerly intact hearts of Tender Love are broken asunder by passion. The crisscrossing box hedges form a maze, evoking a dance.
Within the Renaissance rhetoric, it's all downhill after Passion. In the next quadrant, 'Fickle Love,' (left) the elements are more fragmented. That's because after Passion, things get more complicated. The four fans in the corners of the quadrant symbolise the volatile nature of feelings. Between the volatile fans appear the horns of the jilted lover. And just who was the fickle one? Ladies, remember this was the Renaissance. In the center of this quadrant are the secret love letters or billets doux which the fickle lady sent to her (new) lover. Even the yellow of the plantings is symbolic: the color of jilted love.
During the Renaissance, infidelity could only come to a bad end (still true?). In the final quadrangle, 'Tragic Love,' (visible in the foreground of the photo at right), the voluptuous and serene forms of 'Tender Love' have devolved into a disarray of jagged shapes representing the sharp daggers and swords wielded by rivalrous lovers. The flowers within the parterres are red, to symbolize the blood spilled in these duels to the death.
Adjacent to all this romantic turmoil is a garden of forms representing more nationalistic themes. The Maltese cross (left), the Basque cross of far southwestern France, the Languedoc cross of western Provence, along with highly stylized fleurs de lys, the classic lily flower symbol of France are the themes in this garden which seem to symbolize the unity of these regions under the King of France.
All these geometric gardens are best viewed by an elevated walkway called the 'belvedere' between the gardens and the château. If you continue beyond, you come to the water gardens, which are very Florentine in spirit and similar to if much smaller than those at Versailles. After the emotional tumult of the Garden of Love, it is calming to watch a single regal swan gliding in an elegant rectangle of water set in a sweep of immaculate lawn and surrounded with softly splashing fountains. Continuing around the perimeter of the kitchen garden, you come to a splendid herb garden, elevated at the same level as the Garden of Love, but on the opposite side of the potager from it.
Here, in the delicious shade of an immaculately tended grape arbor, heavily laden at the time of our visit with green fruit (right), are beds dedicated to over 30 varieties of culinary and medicinal herbs considered indispensable to daily life during the time of the Renaissance. Everything is perfectly labeled, so this makes for an interesting amble. Behind the herb garden is a maze, which I didn't visit. I don't think you can enter it anyway, because you might never find your way out of this Garden of Love!
