French formal garden
Its epitome is generally considered to be the Gardens of Versailles designed during the 17th century by the landscape architect André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV and widely copied by other European courts.
His successor Henry II, who had also travelled to Italy and had met Leonardo da Vinci, created an Italian-style garden nearby at the Château de Blois.
[2] Beginning in 1528, King Francis I created new gardens at the Château de Fontainebleau, which featured fountains, parterres, a forest of pine trees brought from Provence, and the first artificial grotto in France.
[4] 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 châteaux, and were usually enclosed by walls.
The different parts of the gardens were not harmoniously joined, and they were often placed on difficult sites chosen for terrain easy to defend, rather than for beauty.
The first important garden à la française was the Chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte, created for Nicolas Fouquet, the Superintendent of Finances to Louis XIV, beginning in 1656.
"The symmetry attained at Vaux achieved a degree of perfection and unity rarely equalled in the art of classic gardens.
They were the largest gardens in Europe, with an area of 15,000 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.
"[8] André Le Nôtre died in 1700, but his pupils and his ideas continued to dominate the design of gardens in France through the reign of Louis XV.
His nephew, Claude Desgots, created the garden at Château de Bagnolet (Seine-Saint-Denis) for Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (1717) and at Champs (Seine-et-Marne), and another relative, Jean-Charles Garnier d'Isle [fr], created gardens for Madame de Pompadour at Crécy[verification needed] (Eure-et-Loir) in 1746 and Bellevue (Hauts-de-Seine) in 1748–50.
The middle of the 18th century saw spread in popularity of the new English landscape garden, created by British aristocrats and landowners, and the Chinese style, brought to France by Jesuit priests from the Court of the Emperor of China.
These styles rejected symmetry in favor of nature and rustic scenes and brought an end to the reign of the symmetrical garden à la française.
[10] Jacques Boyceau, sieur de la Barauderie (c. 1560–1633) the superintendent of royal gardens under Louis XIII, became the first theorist of the new French style.
It is characterised by a symmetrical layout of the flower beds and sheared box hedging to form ornamental patterns known as broderie.
As fashions changed, many parterres de broderie of stately homes had to give way in the 19th century to English landscape gardens and have not been reinstated.
Gardens were designed like buildings, with a succession of rooms which a visitor could pass through following an established route, hallways, and vestibules with adjoining chambers.
In the bosquet du Marais in the gardens of Versailles, André Le Nôtre placed tables of white and red marble for serving meals.
Full-size ships were constructed for sailing on the Grand Canal, and the garden had an open-air ballroom surrounded by trees; a water organ, a labyrinth, and a grotto.
In the first published treatises on gardens, in the 17th century, they devoted chapters to the subject of how to correct or improve perspective, usually to create the illusion of greater distance.
This was often done by having alleys become narrower, or having rows of trees that converged, or were trimmed so that they became gradually shorter, as they went farther away from the centre of the garden or from the house.
This science had come from the military, following the introduction of cannon and modern siege warfare, when they were required to dig trenches and build walls and earth fortifications quickly.
