Jardins du Château de Chenonceau

Type :

Renaissance garden
Formal french garden
Maze
Kitchen garden
Water

Here the art of gardens has found the most beautiful place to bloom…

Architecture and landscape are intimately bound together, with Chenonceau being a “landscape building”, striking just the right balance between stone, water and greenery.
The castle’s true nature, as can be felt immediately beyond the gates, lies in its gardens. The architecture gardens are all outstanding: the garden of Diane de Poitiers, of Catherine de’ Medici and the maze are authentic gardens of memory, resonating with the castle’s history. They are looked after every day and constantly embellished.
2005 saw the birth of the new water fountain in the Jardin de Diane and embellishments to the maze and gazebo, dressed with willow. Planting is refreshed in both the spring and the summer, requiring the installation of 130,000 flower plants that are grown on the estate. Both the kitchen garden and the flower garden have also been completely restructured this year.
Alain Roger with his team of gardeners and Annie Lasnier, designer in charge of the castle’s flower workshop, decided it would be devoted to decorative vegetables. Giant red chard and spectacular gourds in various shades of green mix harmoniously with the flowers in the sumptuous bouquets presented in every room of Chenonceau, in all seasons, and renewed twice a week. Likewise, astonishing flowers such as tuberose and agapanthus grow near the rare pink-flowered strawberry plants.
Starting in the Spring, giant birdcages made of chestnut wood punctuate the kitchen garden’s avenues.
The night walk with music by the master of classicism Arcangelo Corelli and lighting by eminent visual artist Pierre Bideau offer another way of discovering the gardens. The light, placed as the strokes of a paintbrush, becomes an art form, accentuating a basin or a climbing rose… It is a triumph of lightness, the reign of poetry. .