Royal Palaces and Parks of France

by M. F. Mansfield

The English garden was, for the most part, pure affectation in France, or, at best, it was treated as a frank exotic. Even to-day, in modern France, where an old dwelling of the period of Henri IV, François I, Louis XIII, Louis XIV, or Louis XV still exists with its garden, the latter is more often than not on the classically pure French lines, while that of a modern cottage, villa or chateau is often a poor, variegated thing, fantastic to distraction.

Turning back the pages of history one finds that each people, each century, possessed its own specious variety of garden; a species which responded sufficiently to the tastes and necessities of the people, to their habits and their aspirations.

Garden-making, like the art of the architect, differed greatly in succeeding centuries, and it is for this reason that the garden of the moyen-age, of the epoch of the Crusades, for example, did not bear the least resemblance to the more ample parterres of the Renaissance. Civilization was making great progress, and it was necessary that the gardens should be in keeping with a less restrained, more luxurious method of life.

If the gardens of the Renaissance marked a progress over the preaux and jardinets of mediævalism, those of Le Notre were a blossoming forth of the Renaissance seed. Regretfully, one cannot say as much for the garden plots of the eighteenth century, and it was only with the mid-nineteenth century that the general outlines took on a real charm and attractiveness again, and this was only achieved by going back to original principles.

The first gardens were the vergers and preaux, little checker-board squares of a painful primitiveness as compared with later standards. These squares, or carreaux, were often laid out in foliage and blossoming plants as suggestive as possible of their being made of carpeting or marble. When these miniature enclosures came to be surrounded with trellises and walls the Renaissance in garden-making may be considered as having been in full sway.

Under Louis XIV a certain affluence was noticeable in garden plots, and with Louis XV an even more notable symmetry was apparent in the disposition of the general outlines. By this time, the garden in France had become a frame which set off the architectural charms of the dwelling rather than remaining a mere accessory, but it was only with the replacing of the castle-fortress by the more domesticated chateau that a really generous garden space became a definite attribute of a great house.

The first gardens surrounding the French chateaux were developments, or adaptations, of Italian gardens, such as were designed across the Alps by Mercogliano, during the feudal period.

Later, and during the time of the Crusades, the garden question hardly entered into French life. Gardens, like all other luxuries, were given little thought when the graver questions of peace and security were to be considered, and, for this reason, there is little or nothing to say of French gardens previous to the twelfth century.

An important species of the gardens of the moyen-age was that which was found as an adjunct to the great monastic institutions, the preaux, which were usually surrounded by the cloister colonnade. One of the most important of these, of which history makes mention, was that of the Abbaye de Saint Gall, of which Charlemagne was capitular. It was he who selected the plants and vegetables which the dwellers therein should cultivate.

Of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there is an abundant literary record, and, in a way, a pictorial record as well. From these one can make a very good deduction of what the garden of that day was like; still restrained, but yet something more than rudimentary. From now on French gardens were divided specifically into the potager and verger.