Château de Villandry

Château de Villandry

A castle famous for its gardens

The Château de Villandry, in the Loire valley, is a graceful Renaissance château — but people come from all over the world to see not the building but its gardens. Spread out below and beside the château, laid out in neat squares and patterns, the gardens of Villandry are among the most beautiful and famous in the world. Seen from the château's terraces, they look like a giant living tapestry of green, gold and every colour of flower and leaf.

The last great Loire château

Villandry was the last of the grand Renaissance châteaux to be built along the Loire, completed around 1536 for Jean Le Breton, a minister of King Francis I. By then the fashion for these elegant châteaux, with their pale stone, pointed roofs and large windows, was at its height, and Villandry was a fine example. An older medieval keep was kept and built into the new château, linking it to the past.

Gardens lost and found

The original Renaissance gardens of Villandry were changed and lost over the centuries, as fashions shifted and a more natural, English style of park became popular. By the 1800s the famous patterned gardens had disappeared entirely.

Then, in the early 1900s, a new owner named Joachim Carvallo, a scientist with a deep love of art and history, set about recreating the Renaissance gardens from old plans and pictures. With great care and patience, he and his family brought the geometric gardens back to life, and it is largely thanks to them that we can enjoy them today.

A garden of many parts

The gardens of Villandry are made up of several different sections, each with its own character. The most famous is the ornamental kitchen garden, where rows of cabbages, leeks, carrots and other vegetables are planted in colourful geometric patterns, edged with little hedges, so that even humble vegetables become beautiful.

There is also a garden of love, where the hedges are clipped into shapes representing different kinds of love; a water garden with a calm mirror-like pool; a garden of herbs; and a maze. Above them all, terraces give visitors a bird's-eye view of the whole magnificent pattern.

Living with the seasons

The gardens of Villandry change with the seasons, as different vegetables and flowers grow, bloom and are harvested. Tending them is a huge task, carried out by skilled gardeners who plant tens of thousands of vegetables and flowers each year. In this way the gardens are never quite the same twice, and they show how a garden can be both useful and a true work of art.

Visiting today

Visitors can tour the elegant rooms of the château and climb to its terraces and tower for the famous bird's-eye view over the gardens, then wander the patterned paths among the vegetables, flowers, hedges and pools. Few places show so beautifully how the people of the Renaissance loved order, pattern and the marriage of nature and art. Graceful and green, Château de Villandry is the garden-jewel of the Loire valley.