Renaissance gardens When culture rhymes with nature

FROM THE ITALIAN WARS, CHARLES VIII BROUGHT BACK THE MOST BEAUTIFUL OF SPOILS: THE RENAISSANCE AND ITS ART OF GARDENS. FROM BLOIS TO VILLANDRY, MINERAL STAIRCASES AND ANTIQUE STATUES BLEND WITH MAJESTIC TREES, SHIMMERING FLOWERS AND GOURMET VEGETABLE GARDENS.

In 1452, Italian artist and scholar Leon Battista Alberti set out the basic concept of the Renaissance garden: the garden and the home should be considered as a whole and harmonized with the landscape, with paths lined with evergreen plants and a box hedge. In 1503, Pope Julius II commissioned Bramante, architect and painter, to link his Belvedere villa to the Vatican Palace. On the slope separating the two monuments, the architect designed wide terraces linked by a monumental staircase. Along an axis perpendicular to the palace, he laid out the antique statues, flowerbeds and fountains that were to become a feature of the Renaissance garden. Add to this the influence of a popular book, Francesco Colonna’s Le Songe de Poliphile (Poliphile’s Dream), which features labyrinths and a garden island, and you get a glimpse of what the French Renaissance garden was to become.

It was at Château-Gaillard, a stone’s throw from Leonardo’s Clos Lucé, that Dom Pacello de Mercoliano, a humanist Benedictine who came from Italy with King Charles VIII, forged the first gardens of the French Renaissance in 1496. Ordering the garden symmetrically, he created the axial perspective and the famous parterres à la française, including the water mirror. But Pacello was not only a landscape gardener, he was also an agronomist, bringing the first orange trees from afar, planting them in crates for winter storage in troglodytic spaces, inventing greenhouses, and is also said to be the originator of the greengage, a plum named in honor of Francis I’s first wife. Since then, kumquats, Buddha hands and some thirty other citrus fruits have joined the orange trees in the shelter of a thousand-scented cave. Sheltered from the wind on a hillside, Château-Gaillard is more than an estate, it’s an Eden that you can visit along its seven Paradise paths lined with hundred-year-old oaks, cedars, tulip trees and Judas trees.

In addition to Château-Gaillard, the great Pacello created the gardens of Blois, at the request of Louis XII and his new wife Anne de Bretagne (widow of Charles VIII), a great lover of plants. Connected to the château by a stone bridge surmounted by a gallery, they were laid out in three terraces, divided into regular squares with embroidery motifs, and at the intersection of the main paths stood a marble fountain (around the Anne de Bretagne pavilion, still present today). Planted with fruit trees and rare species, the garden was a place of pleasure and sociability, where the king provided entertainment and the Jeu de Paume was played, while the “honest man” was responsible for tending the vegetable garden and orchard. In 1636, Gaston d’Orléans founded a botanical garden in Blois that surpassed that of Paris, with its menagerie and aviary. During the French Revolution, the gardens became “national property” and were divided up.

Finally, a visit to Villandry and its gardens, recreated in the early 20th century in typical Renaissance style, is not to be missed. The park is laid out on three levels: a water garden lined with lemon trees, a pleasure garden including the famous jardin de l’amour, with flowers symbolizing the four forms that love can take (tender, passionate, tragic and adulterous), and the world’s largest ornamental kitchen garden.