Gardens of Power and Passion Monty Don's French Gardens

What images does France conjure up for you?

For me it's beautiful houses and gardens, but also glorious

markets, street cafes, and a deeply formative experience.

When I was 19, I came to the south of France

and lived in Aix-en-Provence for six months.

Ever since then I've loved France and everything to do with it.

And I want to share that passion for the country with you,

through its gardens.

I'll discover what their gardens reveal about French history,

their love of food, the soil, and the arts.

And why they value order and structure so highly.

'I'll be travelling the byways of the French countryside.'

This is what the deux chevaux was made for.

'Meeting local gardeners...'

-Bonjour, je m'appelle Monty.

-Bonjour, Jose.

'..tasting the very best of their harvest...'

Mmm, sometimes this job is really good.

'..getting to turn on huge fountains...'

I can hear the water.

'..and trying to find out what makes French gardens,

'and indeed the French, unique.'

Today I'm going to show you formal French gardens, and reveal how

they were built upon passion, power,

and ambition...and disgrace.

In these gardens you can see the story of France itself,

as the great figures of French history used their gardens to

express their power.

They thought nothing of remodelling landscapes, moving villages,

even diverting rivers.

And I'll see how this formal style, and a rebellion against it,

still resonates today in the culture and gardens of modern France.

This story begins here, by the banks of the River Cher

in the Loire Valley,

and at one of France's most famous chateaux.

The year is 1555.

The place is Chenonceau, in all its renaissance glory.

France is under the rule of Henri II.

The gardens here are amongst the first and most important in France

and there were two built in sequence.

The first, the large rectangular one,

was created by the King's mistress, Diane de Poitiers.

She was older than him, much older, 20 years older, but he adored her,

and he gave her the chateau of Chenonceau

as a statement of his love.

And once here, she made herself a garden.

And when she made it, it was a major work.

It was large, it took four years to build and she put it practically in

the river, so it needed these vast walls to protect it from the water.

When it was done and people saw it, they didn't just admire the garden -

they admired her.

It was a statement of her power in the land.

The garden was a lavish status symbol.

Henri had to raise a special tax to pay for its construction,

and it was built to be both decorative and productive.

We know, for example, there was a delivery of 300 apple trees,

and fruit would have been a key part of it,

and of course the walls would have had fruit growing all the way round.

And there were lots of flowers.

There were irises and lilies and roses,

so it would have been a very productive place,

vegetables in there, too, but it would have been lovely,

it would have smelt lovely.

There would have been flowers in every season.

So it would have been this little paradise,

enclosed and protected, there to be enjoyed in every season and weather.

I do think that this great terrace that goes right round

the garden tells us so much about how the garden was used, and viewed.

Because it wasn't for access.

This was for Diane, and her friends

and ladies in waiting to come and walk round.

You can see them with their wonderful dresses,

slowly promenading round, the chateau in the background

and, significantly, the garden below.

So they viewed it from above and looking inwards.

Diane's garden at Chenonceau is a superb example of an enclosed,

protected Renaissance garden.

But five years after she had completed it, the King died.

His widow, Catherine de Medici, kicked Diane out

and proclaimed her power by building a garden of her own

on the far side of the drawbridge.

In many ways, it's strikingly similar to Diane's,

with the same inward, enclosed structure.

Catherine used it for secret meetings

and political manoeuvring, safe in its enclosed world.

But within 100 years, the rich and powerful of France would be

creating gardens on an even more extraordinary scale,

outdoing each other with ever more ambitious plans.

Landscapes would be reshaped, huge canals dug

and rivers re-channelled to supply elaborate water displays.

These gardens would set a style which has remained

a hallmark of the French garden ever since.

One man dominated this new style of gardening,

and now I want to show you the first of his gardens.

Visiting gardens is really difficult without a car, so I'm on my way

to meet a man who's got a car for me and it's rather a good one.

I used to have a little 2CV years ago,

and I'm looking forward to driving one again.

Jacques, bonjour!

Bonjour! Ca va?

Voila, oui, ca va tres bien.

That's lovely.

So...that lovely feeling.

So, let's put the key in the right way, it always helps.

A little bit tight.

Whoops!

We're off!

The man who designed the garden I'm about to visit

is the most important figure in French garden design.

His name was Andre le Notre.

He was born 400 years ago

and followed his father as royal gardener at the Tuileries in Paris.

The first garden he was commissioned to make was at Vaux le Vicomte,

35 miles south-east of Paris.

Andre le Notre spent 20 years as a royal gardener.

He also painted, and mixed with a group of sophisticated

and creative people.

So by the time he was called to Vaux le Vicomte,

he was ready.

France in the mid-17th century was riven with

rebellion and intrigue.

The King, Louis XIV, had been on the throne

since he was a boy, but had only just taken control of his kingdom.

Le Notre and this brand new garden

would be at the very centre of a royal power struggle.

This is the chateau of Vaux le Vicomte...

..and this is the garden that provoked a king to rage.

At first glance, everything seems completely ordered

and absolutely symmetrical, but in fact it's not symmetrical.

As you look, there are differences on either side.

But what it is, is harmonious and balanced, and that was

the ideal that le Notre was aiming for and achieved miraculously here.

Vaux le Vicomte belonged to, and was commissioned by, Nicolas Fouquet.

He had risen fast to become France's finance minister,

and made himself colossally wealthy in the process.

He wanted to show the world that he had arrived.

He asked le Notre to do something more impressive

and radical than had ever been done before.

The result was a garden with a single great axis which ran

unbroken from the chateau's entrance to the far horizon.

Le Notre's big idea was to cut through the landscape

on a scale that no-one else had ever imagined before.

And that created the impression of the garden reaching right out.

Le Notre broke the mould at Vaux by the scale and effortless ease

in the way that the garden opens out to the visitor.

Carefully judged changes in level meant the allees, pools,

cascades, and the canal that bisects the site

gradually reveal themselves as you walk through.

Mind you, le Notre had Fouquet's limitless fortune,

and an army of 18,000 men, to carve this out of the landscape.

But he also had another weapon in his armour,

and that was military knowledge.

By the middle of the 17th century, cannons had developed enormously

and in response to that, the French in particular

developed the ability to create ramparts

with very sophisticated earth-moving skills,

and le Notre took those skills and applied them to gardens.

Where once there were 190 acres of farm land,

le Notre and his army swept away a village and two hamlets

and diverted a river to create Nicolas Fouquet's garden.

But beneath the garden there were also half a dozen water reservoirs,

ingeniously engineered to feed the fountains, and all done by gravity.

THEY CONVERSE IN FRENCH

'The head gardener, Patrick Borgeaud,

'is showing me how it works.'

You have to turn it like that... do you want a hand?

Oh, that looks good.

Yeah, OK, we'll go down.

OK, here we go.

Attention, la derniere marche!

A-ha!

So, it's the same pump that's been used throughout...

the same system?

How much water is in there?

-That's a lot!

-Oui!

LAUGHTER

Alors...

Wait!

I can hear the water.

All those millions of gallons of water,

collected for the entertainment of a few people.

Fantastic.

The protected intimacy of a Renaissance garden

is thrown open and replaced by vast vistas.

Instead of a safe haven, this garden is about scale and ambition,

presided over by a giant, brooding Hercules.

Vaux le Vicomte wasn't just a series of outdoor rooms

where one might relax, entertain or even scheme.

This was a garden whose scale

made it seem like a provocative political act.

This is a very masculine garden,

and, above all, it's a statement of power and wealth.

But that fact was to prove to be its undoing.

On August 17th, 1661, Nicolas Fouquet threw

a party in the garden to celebrate the completion of the work.

6,000 people were invited,

including the 22-year-old King Louis.

The guests were bedazzled.

There were wonderful fireworks and fountains

and even a specially commissioned play and a ballet.

It was a triumph, except for one thing.

The King was beside himself with fury,

at the arrogance of Fouquet showing that he was richer

and potentially more powerful than himself.

And just a few weeks later he had Fouquet arrested, and had him

sent to prison, where he remained for the rest of his days.

Now, Louis didn't stop there.

Not only had he got rid of the man,

he then proceeded to take everything that everyone had admired so much.

He took statues.

He even dug up plants.

And above all, he took the designers,

amongst whom was Le Notre.

And he said to them, "I want this.

"I want it just as good, if not better, and I want it bigger.

"And I want it at Versailles."

At that time, Versailles was still a modest hunting lodge.

But within a year, Le Notre and his colleagues from Vaux le Vicomte

were busy turning it into a palace and garden fit for a king.

'The hall of mirrors

'is the best introduction to the splendour of Versailles.'

Wow.

'Light is caught and magnified

'in over 350 mirrors.

'And by the time it was finished, in 1680,

'the palace had grown to over 700 rooms,

'and from its windows you can gaze down at the enormity of the grounds,

'with nearly two thousand acres of gardens

'stretching out to the far horizon.'

The genius of Le Notre was to take what was already here

and expand it and transform it.

There was already an avenue running east to west, so he widened it

and put in this vast canal with clipped hedges either side of it,

So that the flat water, the clipped hedges,

were a perfect expression of domination over wildness.

And that was a good thing.

It wasn't considered to be suppression,

but it was about order and harmony and peace.

And to have those things, you had to have power and to have them

in a more dramatic way than anyone else in the world meant that

Louis Quatorze, the Sun King, was the most powerful man in the world.

'Just as he'd done at Vaux le Vicomte,

'Le Notre laid out a series of parterres,

'elaborate patterns in plants, designed to be seen from above.'

Originally, parterres got their colour from ground glass,

broken pots, coloured gravel, but increasingly flowers.

And as they poured in from all over the world, more and more were used,

and tulips, for example, went from being incredibly precious

to being more common.

And, in fact, there are stories of 150,000 plants coming in,

plants being put in overnight so Louis would wake up

and see a new colour scheme, and nurseries made.

There's one in the South of France where exotics would come in

and be trialled and grown on to see if they were hardy.

And if they were good enough, they came up to Versailles.

While the tourists and I battle with our brollies in the wind

and the rain, I'm on my way down to the orangerie, to see

the citrus trees being brought out of their winter quarters.

Being Versailles, this was built as the biggest orangerie in Europe.

There are over 1,100 trees here.

Each one has to be brought out in spring

and then put back into the orangerie in autumn to protect it from frost.

This style of container, of course,

is known in England as a Versailles planter

and it is almost perfect for moving the citrus about.

In Italy, of course, they're in terracotta pots always.

But I bet some of them break, and these can be repaired,

endlessly, because they have metal corners

and then the oak sides get replaced as needed.

Although I have been told that there are records in the 18th century

of them collapsing, and just as they're moved,

the whole thing falls apart,

and that the secret are the metal corners.

'Joel Cottin is the head gardener.'

We all know about Le Notre as a designer

and a great historic figure,

but as a gardener, what do you think he was like?

Versailles took everything that had preceded it and exaggerated it.

There's just more of Versailles than anywhere else.

It's still a byword for enormity in a garden.

And what we see now is not

so very different from the 17th century.

It would have been full of people, because the court had to be here.

They had to be observed, and Louis kept his eye on them.

Le Notre employed several devices

to create the sense of scale and surprise.

Water was perhaps the most important,

which he used in vast reflective pools of light

and in a series of extraordinary fountains.

Another was dramatic allees of tightly clipped trees.

There are few things in life finer than a good hedge.

And the hedges here at Versailles are particularly good.

They are mostly hornbeams, and it lends itself to great big hedges

because it will grow very tall

but, at the same time, can be clipped very narrow.

And this one, for example, is pencil thin so it creates room

for another, narrower passageway on the other side

which has a lot of dynamism and energy,

and I find this completely thrilling.

On either side of the central axis Le Notre laid out

a series of bosquets, small woods contained by clipped hedges.

Merci, merci beaucoup.

Inside each of these bosquets is an entertainment, or spectacle,

designed to be visited in turn

as you make a grand tour of the garden.

Ha!

This was Le Notre's last piece of work at Versailles.

It's the first time I've seen it, and it's known as the salle de bal.

It was created as a dance theatre. The cascade made a backdrop

to the ballet performances laid on for the Court.

Le Notre was in his seventies

when he created his final baroque extravaganza.

It is fantastically impressive.

Although his work was so dramatic,

le Notre himself seems to have been a modest, self-effacing man.

Every account of him has a tone of...

not just respect, but genuine affability.

People liked Le Notre.

He was, by all accounts, a good and decent man, just interested

in his work, he never sought to aggrandise or glorify himself.

And, tellingly, he remained the King's friend right up to his death.

He died in 1700, leaving little in the way of plans,

but gardens in his style would soon be made right across Europe,

thanks to one book that I've come to see in the library at Versailles.

Now, this book is really important,

because it spread the word of Le Notre.

It was called La Theorie et La Pratique du Jardinage,

and it includes plans and descriptions on how to make

parterres, de bosquets,

boulingains, which, of course,

is a corruption of bowling greens,

as well as labyrinths, rooms,

galleries, cascades, all the elements of the fashionable garden.

And the really important thing is it includes a lot of Le Notre's work.

It disseminated it, it spread it across Europe

and this French formal garden design was enormously influential.

And through this book, someone could buy it and say, "Oh, I like that.

"I want that."

Here we are - a palisade a l'Italien, and then a palisade

from Chantilly, and then a theatre from Versailles,

pictures are there, descriptions,

and it was really like a textbook on how to make gardens.

The book was translated into English and German

and soon there were gardens in the new French style

from Blenheim Palace to Saint Petersburg.

'But perhaps the most significant of all Le Notre's achievements are

'the changes he made to the Tuileries Gardens

'in the heart of Paris.

'This has been a public garden for hundreds of years, a place

'for Parisians to meet, promenade, and watch the world go by.'

'It was Le Notre who laid it out in its modern form,

'with its carefully-spaced trees and wide pathways.'

As so often happens,

it was the combination of technology and genius that came together

because the graphometer, which is one of these,

was invented about ten years before Le Notre's birth.

So by the time he began to use it in his twenties, it was established.

And it's a very simple instrument, but it did enable him

to have much grander designs than had hitherto been possible.

And it works on the basis... you have a fixed base line and you

take a reading, and you look down through there and there's a hair

lined up on that, and so I can fix that like that, and it's on a post.

And then you keep that fixed and move round it,

and then adjust this off that baseline, look through,

take a reading, and the angle between the two can be written down.

So you can put that onto a plan, which means that when you give it to

your workmen, they can get it exactly right, even if

it's a mile away and it's a great long canal or a massive avenue.

And of course that, with his vision, changed everything.

With his graphometer in hand and an army of labourers, Le Notre

was able to cut a central access running west, through the garden

and out on beyond its boundaries, into what was then open countryside.

Originally, this new magnificent vista

was named the Avenue des Tuileries.

Now, of course, it's called The Champs Elysees.

It remains the spine of modern Paris.

Well, the only reasonable response to that view is utter amazement.

It is stunning.

I actually last saw it 42 years ago, and I couldn't really remember it.

And I certainly didn't know then that this, of course,

is the line that Le Notre planted.

Of course, now we have the Arc de Triomphe

and beyond, from his planting in the 17th century on,

cutting through the city into the 21st.

In the 1980s, Mitterrand, the President,

had this great arch in La Defense commissioned,

so now Le Notre's line runs through Paris,

stretching from the Tuileries to the Arc de Triomphe

to that arch, running for over five miles.

The arch is the centrepiece of France's financial district,

known as La Defense.

10% of the country's wealth

is concentrated up in these sky scrapers.

From their vantage point, France's financial moguls

can see straight back into the heart of historic Paris.

That is an extraordinary view,

and I suppose you could see it as a sort of brutal motorway,

just bulldozing through the centre of this lovely city.

Or, you can see it completely in the spirit of Le Notre,

this control of nature that somehow humanises it at the same time.

And in that spirit, down here at La Defense,

is a garden.

La Defense was begun in the 1950s

as a defiant symbol of France's post-war recovery,

and there was only ever one choice of garden style

to express the power and the wealth

the city fathers of Paris hoped would be created.

The garden was put out to competition,

which was won by an American called Dan Kiley.

Dan Kiley came to Europe in the Second World War

as a serving American soldier.

Whilst he was here, he visited the great gardens,

and he was enormously influenced by Vaux le Vicomte and Versailles.

And there's an irony that it took an American

to bring back the spirit of Le Notre to Paris.

The choice of planting

reflects how the world has changed since Le Notre's day.

It's easy to think of these beautifully-pruned plane trees

as quintessentially French and particularly Parisian,

but in fact, they're very practical.

The reason they were planted, and continue to be planted,

is because they resisted pollution.

And an awful lot of Le Notre's trees died out in the 19th century

because of the increased use of coal, which then polluted them.

The trees just couldn't cope with this smog that fell on them.

But of course, plane trees lose their bark,

so that a year's accumulation of black soot was just shed,

and they started over again.

So actually, it's completely practical.

I wonder what Le Notre would have made

of this concrete and glass city -

buildings jostling and competing for space,

with none of the symmetry or balance of Versailles or Vaux le Vicomte.

But his legacy can be found in odd corners.

As you wander around, you discover that off the main drag

are these side gardens, like this one.

The cherry today is absolutely at its best.

And it's not too fanciful to feel

that Kiley has deliberately taken the idea of the bosquet,

and instead of having trees and square woods,

has got these square concrete blocks of flats,

and then little sort of jewel-like gardens inside them.

Dan Kiley took the style of Le Notre and expressed it in modern language.

But everywhere you look in Paris,

you can see the visual vocabulary of Le Notre's great gardens,

still closely associated with power, wealth and the state.

Outside Les Invalides,

France's military museum and Napoleon's tomb,

rows of topiary stand like soldiers waiting to go into battle.

In public squares like the Place des Vosges,

the plane trees are lined up in strict geometric lines.

Order, harmony and symmetry are everywhere.

And not just in gardens.

Bonjour.

See, what you have here

is the extraordinary elegance of French formality.

It's something that the British can't really do,

and if we do do it, we copy the French.

But that symmetry and order, coupled with a refinement -

it's seen everywhere, and this sort of epitomises it.

Slightly frivolous, but in the best possible way.

Choices, choices...

Tarte citron, s'il vous plait.

Oui, c'est tout pour le moment.

-D'accord.

-Merci.

This elegant formality is as relevant today

as it was in the 16th century.

But there is another style of garden

that came about as a result of the greatest crisis in French history.

At the end of the 18th century, the Revolution disposed of royalty

and aristocratic power.

With this came new fashions, not least in gardens.

The formal style of Le Notre became associated

with the tyranny of the hated aristocracy,

and was replaced by a new, liberated informality.

This is Malmaison, the home of Napoleon and Josephine

on the western outskirts of Paris.

There was once a large estate surrounding the house,

but all that remains today

is a beautifully-restored wildflower meadow and some woods.

It's said that Napoleon and Josephine

planted this cedar of Lebanon to commemorate Napoleon's victory

at the Battle of Marengo on 14th June, 1800.

And that was the beginning of the garden here at Malmaison.

Now, Josephine was a real gardener, and she was a very serious botanist,

but her real passion, which amounted almost to an obsession, were roses.

And Josephine's passion for roses was as influential in its own way

as the parterres of Le Notre.

Josephine set out to collect every type of rose growing in the world.

Now, that was reckoned to be about 250 at that time,

and Napoleon apparently instructed his generals to bring back plants

wherever they were fighting in the world.

So all the forces of the French Empire went behind this quest.

Now, we don't know how successful it was, because when she died in 1814,

there was no inventory of roses left behind.

But what we do have is a fantastic pictorial record

of at least some of her roses,

because Josephine did commission a Belgian, Pierre-Joseph Redoute,

to make engravings of her roses,

and they are amongst the loveliest botanical images ever produced.

I've got one here, of a rose grown at Malmaison,

here looking at it at Malmaison, and that in itself is a thrilling thing.

And it is Rosa indica - Rosier du Bengale Cent Feuilles.

Now, "cent feuilles" is a hundred leaves, or centifolia.

The names have changed since Josephine's time,

but this is probably a centifolia rose,

which would have grown out there, in the garden.

There are few roses left at Malmaison,

but here at Roseraie de l'Hay, some 20 miles away,

there is a magnificent collection

brought together by a rose enthusiast

at the end of the 19th century.

Jules Gravereaux set out to create a collection

to surpass even Josephine's,

including the roses illustrated by Redoute.

And here it is, in the flesh, nearly 200 years later - Redoute's rose.

It's called Rose du Bengale, from Malmaison, and preserved as such.

And to make that link, to know this was what Josephine collected,

this was what Redoute drew, and here it is, in my hand,

I'm holding it, I can smell it...

..and it is heavenly.

It's a lovely rose. I've never grown it myself.

But that link is such powerful history.

You might think of roses as being part of a typically English garden,

but Josephine was the first person in Europe

to systematically collect them, and in the 19th century,

the French were the world's leading rose breeders,

and the names of many of our best-loved roses,

such as Colonel de Richelieu, Madame Alfred Carriere,

Souvenir de Malmaison, or Chapeau de Napoleon, are French.

I'm on my way to the Chateau of Courson,

20 miles south of the Roseraie.

It hosts France's biggest flower show,

and I want to see if Josephine's floral legacy

has the same potency in the 21st century.

Among the 250 stalls, a dozen of them are rose growers.

Like Denis.

Bonjour.

Oui.

Oui.

Oui?

Bon. Merci. Merci beaucoup. Au revoir.

Despite the rain, I'm having a good time.

There's an easy informality, which has echoes of Malmaison.

This is good.

See, they've got rhubarb for sale, direct from the producer,

spread out on a leaf on the ground,

but it's a plant stall, selling rheums.

Of course, rhubarb is a rheum, and is a cousin of the Rheum palmatum,

that you grow by your pond, which is entirely decorative.

And what I particularly like is the way that this stall feels artless.

This looks like it's just arrived, unloaded the van, put it out,

and there it is.

And that does give it a kind of authenticity and real charm,

that this whole show has.

There's something truly charming about it.

The more informal style of gardening was called by the French,

"Le jardin a l'Anglaise,"

and certainly most of these plants here at Courson

would be at home in an English country garden.

But I wonder if this is also true in Paris?

This is the Quai de la Megisserie,

where Parisians have been buying their plants and seeds

for hundreds of years.

I've come here to meet Didier Boux

to find out what the people of Paris are growing today.

Bonjour.

Bonjour, monsieur.

Avez vous Anglais?

-Just a little.

-Just a little?

-Yes.

I understand that you've been working here for three generations.

-Yes, from here in this shop, from my grandfather...

-Yeah.

-We arrived in 1929 from the Massif Centrale...

-Yeah?

..to sell some plants and beans and seeds for the people of Paris.

And do Parisians like flowers?

Do they enjoy flowers and buy a lot?

They buy flowers.

In Paris, the French people, they prefer to buy plants like this,

with flower, and we have two sorts of people to buy in our shop -

first is the gardener for vegetables,

so they buy tomatoes, they buy cucumbers, salad, all things,

in plant and in seeds.

And after, you have people who live in apartments in Paris,

-and they want to make a small flower in a big box, that's all.

-Yes.

-And they buy geranium...

-You have lots of colour.

It is... They are all in flower, aren't they?

-They have...

-Yes.

-They're not buying plants that will grow -

they're buying buy plants that are good now.

So the modern French gardener does love flowers,

but without the bother of growing them.

Space in Paris is at a premium.

It's got more than twice the population density of London,

so gardens are rare.

However, I've heard that one of their most upmarket fashion houses

has managed to fit one into an unlikely place.

Hermes is a family firm,

and the roof garden was created for their private use.

Who'd have thought this would be on a roof?

It's very smart.

White tulips...

White pansies. I bet these are white iceberg roses.

Looking astonishingly healthy.

It's funny to see a hawthorn pruned like that.

That's really interesting.

A hawthorn, which I think of in my garden

as just a scrubby part of a hedge, treated as a decorative shrub.

Lovingly pruned.

It's nice.

This garden strikes me as a modern version

of les jardins a l'Anglaise -

it's understated, controlled elegance.

Of course, what this is is international good taste.

It's stylish, it's chic, it actually smells a bit of money.

So I guess it's very Parisian, it's probably St Petersburg, New York,

Boston, who knows, even Shanghai now.

I bet there's a roof garden in Shanghai that's quite like this,

probably a Hermes roof garden in Shanghai.

Um...

And there does seem to be a language of the wealthy

that is to do with leather and white and box balls,

and one part of me feels extremely cynical about it.

And the other part of me, rather shamefully, just likes it.

Of course, the other thing, which I bet happens here

is that terribly competitive business, fashion business.

And everybody's always looking at each other,

and they'll be looking over at this roof garden and judging it.

"Oh, looking a bit shabby," or, "Hmm, that's a bit good."

Cos actually, if you look over there, there's another roof garden,

for a company who shall be nameless,

that clearly could do with a little bit of tending to.

# I love Paris

# Why oh why do I love Paris

# Because my love is near... #

Given the time, money and manpower involved,

I thought it might be impossible to find a modern example

of the kind of lavish formality we associate with Le Notre's gardens.

However, there is a garden here in Normandy

that has been made in the last 20 years that I think Fouquet

and the Sun King himself would have been envious of,

even if it's only for its scale and its ambition,

and, to be honest, for its brashness, too.

Just 20 years ago,

the garden at Champ de Bataille was an empty field.

Many million Euros later,

it's been turned into a garden that Le Notre would be proud of.

Parterre, central axis, fountains,

all the hallmarks of the formal 17th century garden are here.

And it is all the creation of Jacques Garcia.

Garcia first fell in love with this place as a child

when he would bicycle past it on his way to school,

and decades later,

when he had made a fortune as an international interior designer,

he then got the chance to buy it.

The sheer effort, time and cost of creating a garden like this,

with all modern-day equipment,

does make the gardens of 300 years ago all the more impressive.

Oui.

MONTY LAUGHS

That's amazing!

-JACQUES LAUGHS

-Amazing.

Oui.

So nothing there before at all.

Oui.

JACQUES LAUGHS

Et...

Mmm.

But it has evidently been worth it,

and Jacques is adamant

that it is more than just a pastiche of Le Notre.

A garden like this is so outside normal domestic experience

that it's hard to take in.

And, you know, you can see what happened to Nicolas Fouquet -

he tried it, he came to a bad end,

and Louis XIV could rule the world,

and so the garden became an expression of that.

And for Monsieur Garcia,

it is an incredible thing to attempt to do,

and he did say if he had known, he never would have tried it.

And the millions it's cost him, and the years it's taken.

But how fabulous that it's done.

The baroque garden was a place that was shiny, it was gold-plated,

it was splashy and noisy, and absolutely about money.

So if you come here, which you should do because it's lovely,

what you're getting is what the 17th century garden

actually would have been like.

When you walk here, you're walking in exactly the same spirit

of a garden that Versailles was, or Vaux le Vicomte.

It's got under the skin of the 17th century

in a way that no historical recreation, however accurate,

ever could do.

Perhaps Garcia's creation confirms

that in the end, France's greatest contribution to landscape gardens

is in the formality and scale set by Le Notre.

This style of gardening, with its balance, order

and love of structure, is still at the heart of French life.

From the modernist allees of La Defense,

the rows of plane trees in the public gardens of Paris,

and even in the layout of Paris itself.

Added to this, Josephine's love of roses and informality

can still be found.

I've kept my favourite garden, the Chateau de Courances, to last,

because it has the best qualities of both styles.

I want to show you now a garden

that's about 35 miles south of Paris.

And I love it, because it seems to me the perfect combination

of the rigour and formality of the 17th century formal garden,

and also the charm that comes when a garden is allowed to mature

and slowly age across the centuries.

Versailles and Vaux le Vicomte

have been preserved as they were in the 17th century.

But Courances shows what happens

when you allow this formal style to change and evolve.

First created during the Renaissance,

the gardens were remodelled in the style of Le Notre,

but fell into disuse.

When the de Ganay family bought the abandoned chateau in the 1870s,

they restored the gardens, and have continued to adapt them since.

From its beginning, the layout of Courances

has been hugely influenced by its ready supply

of that one key ingredient of the French formal garden -

water.

In the 17th century, the single most impressive thing

to have in your garden was water,

and people went to extraordinary lengths

both financially and with ingenuity, not to say skill,

to provide it, to control it, shape it, divert it,

and to impress people.

Now, Courances has masses of water, and that's because it's a wet place.

There are springs popping up all over the place.

And the net result is that there is a kind of effortless ease

with which it's carried.

Perhaps the garden's greatest involuntary transformation

came in the last war,

when the Chateau was requisitioned

by first the Germans and then the Allies,

and much of the garden was buried under concrete.

I'm having tea with Philippine de Ganay,

who's lived here for over 60 years.

Field Marshall Montgomery was here, very strict,

he was only nice with...

I mean, only charming with the children.

My daughters, who were tiny - seven, eight and ten,

-and we thought he was very nice, but not very amusing.

-Mmm.

So, what was the garden like just after the war?

It was a shambles.

Because as you know, a garden -

if you haven't taken care of it for four years...

And my husband, when he came back from Indochina,

he said, "Ah, I'm going to try and save it."

And then he changed the park a lot,

because all the paths used to be in gravel, you know,

there were people, scratch, scratch all day,

or in yellow sand,

and now there's none left apart from this one across,

all the rest you've been walking on is grass.

-Yes.

-I must say, I think it's a very beautiful

and very formal, pompous garden.

Generally, they're formal and pompous,

but they don't have much charm.

And I find this has charm, and people say to me, "Oh, c'est charmant."

Well, it's funny to say that about something like this, you see?

So I hope they continue liking it as we did.

By replacing the hard lines and gravel paths

of the historic garden with lawn,

Philippine and her husband have made Courances

into a garden which is both formal and romantic.

It's interesting how at this time of year in particular,

mid-spring, the emerging leaves don't cast shade as such,

they just change the texture of the green.

So you have all these different green lights,

from the very pale to the really quite rich and dark, but not sombre.

And that's lovely, and also because you know that it's temporary,

it feels precious.

So the whole thing glows.

One of the things I love about Courances

is the way it takes the classic forms of the French formal garden,

and lets them grow wild to transform them.

The bosquet at Versailles, a tightly-enclosed little wood

with the trees peeking out of the top of tall hedges.

But here, the woods have exploded out, they're mature,

they've got hundreds of years' worth of growth,

and the hedges are garden-sized.

And so the relationship has completely changed

between the inside and the outside,

and if anything, I think this looks better.

The key to this garden is that it is as historical

in terms of provenance and story

as any in France, really, but that it has evolved.

It's evolved in the way that people use it,

and also in the way that plants have been allowed to grow.

They've changed and adapted.

But the spirit of the garden, and that means the framework, too,

has remained,

and it's that balance that has been nurtured and maintained

between the past and the living present that makes it so successful.

Next time, I get my hands dirty,

and explore a very different side to French life.

That's it!

Their passion for food, and their fantastic kitchen gardens.

From the monastic tradition, through the great historical proteges,

to the gardens of Michelin-starred restaurants.

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