Vacations Destinations

No visit to the Loire Valley is complete without visiting the magnificient gardens on display. The kitchen garden in the Loire Valley is a veritable art form and is incredibly inspiring. What better way to enjoy the splendours of the Loire Valley than to rent a castle for a family vacation. Whilst you enjoy your castle rental visit the many beautiful gardens dotted along the Loire and the Cher and Indre River. There is a good reason the entire area is listed as a World Heritage site by UNESCO. You should rent a castle and enjoy what this heritage area has to offer.

Visitors flock to Villandry for its harmonious vision of gardens and architecture.

Fifteen kilometres west of Tours, and nine kilometres west of Azay-le-Rideau, Villandry built in 1536 is the last in the series of the great Renaissance chateaux of the Loire. It was the seat neither of a king, nor of a king’s mistress, but of one of France’s ministers, Jean Le Breton.

Le Breton’s had considerable architectural experience and he oversaw work for the Crown for many years and directed construction of Chambord. Earlier in his career he had been stationed as an Ambassador in Italy and he had the opportunity to study the art of gardening.

The gardens were designed by Joachim Carvallo a spanish doctor and laid out between 1907 and 1920. He drew his inspiration from local tradition and the remains of the original layout.

At the highest level is a large basin in the shape of a Louis XV mirror. It is called “Le Miroir d’eau” Its water feeds the moat, the fountains, and the irrigation system. The fountains at Villandry play an important role bringing music to the gardens with the gentle splashing of water on stone andd lending a freshness to the air.

In the middle is the ornamental or pleasure garden - “Jardin d’ornement” with flower beds framed by box hedges.

Under the windows of the west wing and on the same level as the outbuildings, is the third garden - the ornamental kitchen garden.

Each of the three gardens is surrounded and overlooked by a raised and covered pathway. Limetree-vaulted pergolas on the top and grapevines trailingover a trellis below.

One of the premiere design features of the gardens of Chateau Villandry is that gardens should be viewed from abvoe, either from contiguous buildings, or from raised terraces surrounding the beds.

Gardening techniques

In total, the gardens at Villandry cover 5 hectares tendered by only nine full time gardeners. This is an incredibly low ration of gardeners given the density of the planting.

Rigorous planning and a precisely organised timetable is implemented. The kitchen garden uses some twenty thousand flowering plants, sixty thousand vegetables in spring and forty thousand in summer.

The whole gardening team participate in the design of the planting arrangements for the kitchen garden each year. Two plans are needed each year. The spring plan which uses peas, broad beans, radishes, lentils, springn cabbage, lettuce (romaine, red and green). Some perennials are also included - strawberries, sorrel, chives. Various spring flowers are planted in the edging to bring some colour to the kitchen garden like alternating reda nd yellow pansies, large white daiseies, blue pansies, forget-me-knots and stock.

The summer plan fixes the arrangement of flowers and vegetables from June into autumn. the main vegetables are cabbages, pumpkins, spinish, beets, swiss chard, celery, celeriac, carrots, leeks, aubergines, capsicums, tomatoes, chives, parsley, basil, round or long beetroot, gourds, endives and cardoons. Petunias, verbena, purple sage, marigold, begonias, tobacco plants are used as edgings.

Technical factors for Chateau Villandry.

Each planting for spring and summer for the kitchen garden need to take into account both the technical and aesthetic factors.

Crop Rotation

Careful crop rotation is essential if soil exhaustion and plant disease are to be avoided.

It is not a good idea to plant vegetables of the same family in a bed the following year because they take the same nutrients from the soil and are vulnerable to the same soil-borne diseases. For example you should not plant carrots in a bed used the previous year for celery as they are both members of the Umbellifer family. Similarly cabbages and radishes both Crucifers, should not be allowed to follow each other.

Balancing this technical factor can be quite a challenge given that there are eight botanical families planted in the kitchen garden and it is advisable to wait three years before replanting a bed with a member of the same family and there are two plantings a year for each bed in the kitchen garden at Chateau Villandry.

Originally the kitchen garden was watered from the fountain in the middle of each squaree. Now an automatic irrigation is now used to water all five hectares.

Aesthetic factors

The patterns of form and colour are the second major factor in planning the kitchen garden. The texture, form and colour of each vegetable all contribute to the multicoloured chequerboard of the kitchen garden. It is a difficult exercise because vegetables often offer little in the way of colour contrast.

The gardening team at Chateau Villandry try to bring together contrasts such as the jade green of the carrots and the blue of the leeks, or the red of the beetroot leaves and the golden-tinted green of celery.

The kitchen garden covers a hectare and consists of nine identical sized squares in a square pattern. The square beds were popular in France during the Renaissance period. Each square has a different box hedge pattern. Inside the hedges forty-odd varieties of vegetables and floweres are planted out with their alternating colours making up a rainbow chequerboard. Each of the squares has thirty standard roses, laid out in geometric patterns, and sixteen pyramid-trained pear-trees.

Words can not do the gardens justice and no trip to the Loire Valley in France would be complete without a visit to Villandry and its magnificent gardens.