French garden

The garden with the Frenchwoman or traditional garden is a garden with esthetic ambition and symbolic system. It carries to its apogee art to correct nature to impose the Symétrie on it. It expresses the desire of exalter in the plant the triumph of the order on the disorder, of the culture on wild nature, considered on the spontaneous one. It culminates at the 17th century with creation for Louis XIV of the garden to the Frenchwoman copied soon by all the courses of Europe.

Laws of composition

The standard organization of the garden to the Frenchwoman, heir to the Garden to Italian the, is fixed as of the middle of the 16th century.

Philibert of the Elm, on its return of Rome in 1536, carries out the gardens of Anet. It brings back of its voyage this direction of the proportion which missed with the French gardens, still too sullied of the model of the medieval enclosed garden.

The harmony learnedly calculated in the drawing of the floors and the use of water surfaces coming to be integrated into the compartments of greenery are the first examples of what constitutes the spirit of the garden classique :

  • the plan is geometrical and fully exploits the new discoveries of the optique  ;
  • a elevated terrace dominates it and makes it possible to the visitor at a single glance to seize the fitting of the jardin  ;
  • a perspective axis passes by the apartments. On this axis order symétriquement :
    • allées  ;
    • geometrical figures of the Floor S and bassins  ;
    • alignments of trees.

The free compartments of this perfect plan are occupied by the Broderie S of cut Buis, the floors and the thickets. The alleys are rythmées by Statue S and Topiaires.

More one moves away from the Château and of the heart of the garden to the Frenchwoman and more the countryside takes again its rights, with its natural vegetation of wood and meadows.

Gardens of architects

Formed with the drawing of architecture, the originators of French gardens of the XVIIe century let show through the prevalence of this major art on all the others.

The French garden is the prolongation of the residence. It domesticates and orders nature according to the principles of the geometry, optics and the prospect. The garden is drawn like a building, in a succession of parts which the visitor crosses according to a pre-established course, hall with the parts of pageantry.

The architectural vocabulary used in the description of the garden to the Frenchwoman translates without ambiguity the intentions of the draftsman. One speaks there about rooms , rooms or theaters of greenery. One moves between walls of hedges or along staircases of water. One recovers the ground of carpet of lawn embroidered boxwood , the trees are cut in curtain along the alleys.

The Hydraulicien S use all their resources to furnish the garden sumptuously. The Eau reproduces the crystals glosses, the basins play the part of Miroir S. In the thicket of the Marsh with Versailles, the landscape designer of Louis XIV André Ours has the white and red marble tables to serve as the dressers. Water while escaping manufactures virtual carafes, glasses and vases which imitate the crystal.

Contrast is only stronger when the XVIIe century discovers the taste of the gardens to English the which them, are above all the gardens of painters.

The corrected prospect

The garden with the Frenchwoman cannot be reduced to the rigorous application of the geometrical layouts and the laws of the prospect. As of the publication of the first treated, to the beginning of the XVIIe century, complete chapters are devoted to the corrected prospect. With the difference of the optical prospect, primarily theoretical, the corrected prospect anticipates the deformations related to the effects of fuite.
From these observations are born from the solutions originales : progressive widening of the alleys and the compartments to shorten the scale of the garden (Be worth-the-Viscount), spacing of alignments of trees compared to the theoretical axis (Tanlay).
The freedom taken by the draftsmen of gardens to the Frenchwoman with the rules of the ideal prospect enables them to avoid the rigidity of the geometry. With the increasing demand throughout the XVIIe century of increasingly ambitious gardens, one will then attend an inversion of the values. With Chantilly as with Saint-Germain, the garden is not any more the prolongation of the castle but the castle became one of the accessories of the garden, of which it occupies a compartment now.

Principal gardens with the Frenchwoman

  • Potager of the castle of the Rock-Guyon of the Château of the Rock-Guyon
  • Château of Breteuil
  • Château of Chantilly
  • Château of Josselin
  • Jardin of Luxembourg to Paris
  • Parc of Saint-Cloud
  • Parc of Seals
  • Château of Saint-Germain-in-Bush hammer
  • Château of Be worth-the-Viscount
  • Parc of the Château of Versailles
  • Château of Villandry
  • Jardin of Tileries to Paris
  • Jardin of évêché of Castrate by André Ours in 1616

See too

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