French formal garden

Gardens of the Chateau of Versailles
(Île-de-France)

The French formal garden, also called jardin à la française, is a style of garden based on symmetry and the principle of imposing order over nature. It reached its apogee in the 17th century with the creation of the Gardens of Versailles, designed for Louis XIV by the landscape architect André Le Nôtre. The style was widely copied by other courts of Europe.

History of the Garden à la française

The Italian Influence

The Garden à la francaise evolved from the Gardens of the French Renaissance, a style which was imported into France at the beginning of the 16th century. The Italian Renaissance style, typified by the Boboli Gardens in Florence and the Villa Medici in Fiesole, was characterized by planting beds, or parterres, created in geometric shapes, and laid out symmetrical patterns; the use of fountains and cascades to animate the garden; stairways and ramps to unite different levels of the garden;grottos, labyrinths, and statuary on mythological themes. The gardens were designed to represent harmony and order, the ideals of the Renaissance, and to recall the virtues of Ancient Rome.

Gardens of the Château de Chantilly.

Following his campaign in Italy in 1495, where he saw the gardens and castles of Naples, King Charles VIII brought Italian craftsmen and garden designers, such as Pacello da Mercogliano, from Naples and ordered the construction of Italian-style gardens at his residence at the Chateau d'Amboise. His successor Henry II, who had also traveled to Italy and had met Leonardo DaVinci, created an Italian nearby at the Chateau de Blois. Beginning in 1528, King Francis I of Francecreated new gardens at the Chateau de Fontainebleau, which featured fountains, parterres, a forest of pine trees brought from Provence and the first artificial grotto in France. The Chateau de Chenonceau, had two gardens in the new style, one created for Diane de Poitiers in 1551, and a second for Catherine de Medici in 1560.

In 1536 the architect Philibert de l'Orme, upon his return from Rome,created the gardens of the Château d'Anet following the Italian rules of proportion. The carefully-prepared harmony of Anet, with its parterres and surfaces of water integrated with sections of greenery, became one of the earliest and most influential examples of the classic French garden. 

While the gardens of the French Renaissance were much different in their spirit and appearance than those of the Middle Ages, they were still not integrated with the architecture of the chateaux, and were usually enclosed by walls. the different parts of the gardens were not harmoniously joined together, and they were often placed on difficult sites chosen for terrain easily to defend, rather than for beauty. All this was to change in the middle of the 17th century with the development of the first real Garden à la française.

Basin of Apollo, Gardens of Versailles

Vaux-le-Vicomte

The first important garden à la française was the Chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte, created by Nicolas Fouquet, the superintendent of Finances to Louis XIV, beginning in 1656. Fouquet commissioned Louis Le Vau to design the chateau, Charles LeBrun to design statues for the garden, and Andre Le Notre to create the gardens. For the first time, that garden and the chateau were perfectly integrated. A grand perspective of 1500 meters extended from the foot of the chateau to the statue of the Hercules of Farnese; and the space was filled with parterres of evergreen shrubs in ornamental patterns, bordered by colored sand, and the alleys were decorated at regular intervals by statues, basins, fountains, and carefully sculpted topiaries. "The symmetry attained at Vaux achieved a degee of perfection and unity rarely equalled in the art of classic gardens. The chateau is at the center of this strict spatial organization which symbolizes power and success."

Parterres of the Orangerie
of the Château of Versailles

Gardens of Versailles

The Gardens of Versailles, created by Andre Le Notre between 1662 and 1700, were the greatest achievement of the Garden à la francaise. They were the largest gardens in Europe - with an area of 15000 hectares, and were laid out on an east-west axis followed the course of the sun: the sun rose over the Court of Honor, lit the Marble Court, crossed the Chateau and lit the bedroom of the King, and set at the end of the Grand Canal, reflected in the mirrors of the Hall of Mirrors. In contrast with the grand perspectives, reaching to the horizon, the garden was full of surprises - fountains, small gardens fill with statuary, which provided a more human scale and intimate spaces.

The central symbol of the Garden was the sun; the emblem of Louis XIV, illustrated by the statue of Apollo in the central fountain of the garden. "The views and perspectives, to and from the palace, continued to inifinity. The king ruled over nature, recreating in the garden not only his domination of his territories, but over the court and his subjects."