Château de Villandry

Interesting facts

The kitchen garden alone is outlined by 52,728 box plants, adding up to more than seven kilometres of clipped hedging.

Each year the gardeners raise more than 100,000 plants from seed to fill the beds for the spring and summer plantings.

About a thousand lime trees line the avenues, and pruning them occupies part of the garden team for the whole winter.

The vegetable squares are framed by 144 goblet-trained pear trees of ten varieties and about a kilometre of cordon-trained apples.

Some 324 standard roses in 21 varieties rise above the vegetable beds, adding height and colour to the patterns.

Roughly forty kinds of vegetables from eight botanical families are used, chosen as much for leaf colour and shape as for eating.

The gardens went fully organic in 2009, with weeding done by hand and prevention preferred to any chemical treatment.

Inside the château is a Moorish carved ceiling taken from a 13th-century palace of the Dukes of Maqueda in Toledo, Spain.

In 1754 the estate was bought by Michel-Ange de Castellane, a former French ambassador to the Ottoman court, who remodelled it.

The sun garden on the highest terrace is a modern creation, opened only in 2008.

Why it is worth it

Villandry is remembered less for its house than for what lies in front of it: the most famous formal garden in the Loire Valley, laid out on terraces in the valley of the Cher, close to the Loire. Seen from the upper terrace, the ground below becomes a geometric carpet of clipped box, coloured beds, gravel paths and water. It is a garden to be read from above, like a page of a Renaissance pattern book.

The château itself was built around 1536 by Jean Le Breton, a finance minister of King Francis I, who replaced an older fortress but kept its fourteenth-century keep; tradition places a peace meeting between Philip Augustus and Richard the Lionheart at the earlier castle. Le Breton's heirs held the estate for more than two centuries; after the Revolution Napoleon gave it to his brother Jérôme. The doctor Joachim Carvallo bought it in 1906 with the fortune of his American wife Ann Coleman, and spent the rest of his life stripping it back and recreating a Renaissance layout from old plans and treatises. His family still owns Villandry, and it is part of the Loire Valley World Heritage Site.

The gardens work in layers. The kitchen garden is the showpiece: nine square compartments, each with a different geometric pattern, planted with vegetables and flowers chosen for colour as much as for the table, replanted twice a year so the picture changes with the seasons. Above it, the ornamental garden includes the gardens of love, four box parterres whose motifs stand for tender, passionate, fickle and tragic love, with hearts, horns and blades picked out in hedging. Higher still, a large mirror pool forms the water garden, and the sun garden, on the highest terrace, adds a star-shaped basin and softer planting. There is also a hedge maze.

Getting there

Villandry lies on the south bank of the Cher, west of Tours, about 11 km from Joué-lès-Tours. Tours Val de Loire Airport (TUF) is about 19 km away. The château is on the Loire à Vélo cycle route, a pleasant way to arrive from Tours.

Château de Villandry

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

On these lists

From the encyclopaedia