Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps

Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps (7 June 1824 at Saint-Antoine-du-Rocher – 12 September 1873 at Vichy) was a French horticulturist and landscape architect.

His landscape gardens, with their lakes, winding paths, sloping lawns, groves of exotic trees and flower beds, had a large influence on public parks throughout Europe and in the United States.

The Emperior had conceived a plan to create large new parks around Paris, to provide green space and recreation for the rapidly growing population of the city.

[1] To provide trees, shrubs and flowers for the park, he had gardens and greenhouses built near the racetrack of Longchamps, and at Auteuil.

He created another garden at Petit-Bry, on the banks of the Marne River, specially to grow trees to line the boulevards of Paris.

This complex was composed of thirty greenhouses, lit with gas lights, each with its own conditions devoted to different varieties of plants.

One group of greenhouses was filled entirely with thousands of fuchsia, chrysanthemum, canna, pelagorium, verveine, calceolaira, and ageratum plants.

[2] In addition to the large new gardens around the edges of Paris, Barillet-Dechamps was responsible for providing trees to line the newly built avenues that Baron Haussmann was building.

He helped in the design of gardens in Marseille, in Turin, in Belgium, in Austria, in Prussia, in Turkey, and in Egypt.

[4] Barillet-Deschamps did not write formal treatises about landscape gardening, but in his correspondence he described his method and basic principles when laying out a park: "First, study the relief of the site.