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Monty Don's French Gardens | |
---|---|
Genre | Documentary Adventure travel |
Starring | Monty Don |
No. of episodes | 3 |
Production | |
Producer | BBC |
Running time | 3 × 1 hour |
Original release | |
Network | BBC Two |
Monty Don's French Gardens is a television series of three programmes in which British gardener and broadcaster Monty Don visits several of France's most celebrated gardens. A book based on the series, The Road to Le Tholonet: A French Garden Journey, was also published. [1]
Monty Don explores the gardens of France and the ways in which they displayed the power and influence of French nobility. He finds the spirit and style of old French gardens in restored gardens, brand new gardens, and even in the heart of modern day Paris. A very important part of the powerful gardens were to be able to show the amount of wealth and power the owner of the garden has and to impress others. [2]
Historical Figures Discussed:
Places Visited:
Chenonceau Garden is located in the Loire valley of France. The garden is made up of multiple gardens, and the main two gardens were owned by prominent figures: Catherine de Medici and Diane de Poiters.
Monty Don travels across France visiting numerous gardens specialising in fruit and vegetable production. He unfolds the French's love of food has influenced their garden designs and core purpose. In doing so, he explores themes of form versus function; growing for consumption, for market, and for aesthetic; and terroir (location, climate, and soil). In this episode, he visits the following gardens and sites: [3] [4]
In comparison to the first episode of the series, Monty Don is focused less on the roles of the rich and powerful in developing France's garden aesthetic. Instead, he employs a social history of France, rather than a political history, to develop a sense of French gardens and their relationship with food.
In the final episode of the mini-series, Don once again travels across France in search of the country's most venerated gardens. This segment focuses on the relationship and intersections between gardens and art. Don visits the gardens of two of France's most famous artists - Paul Cézanne and Claude Monet - to explore how their landscapes influenced their work and also tours more contemporary gardens that fuse together artistic aesthetics with the natural and doctored landscapes. In this episode, he visits the following gardens and sites: [5]
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A château is a manor house or residence of the lord of the manor, or a fine country house of nobility or gentry, with or without fortifications, originally, and still most frequently, in French-speaking regions.
The Château de Chenonceau is a French château spanning the river Cher, near the small village of Chenonceaux, Indre-et-Loire, Centre-Val de Loire. It is one of the best-known châteaux of the Loire Valley.
The Château de Chaumont, officially Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire, is a castle (château) in Chaumont-sur-Loire, Centre-Val de Loire, France. The castle was founded in the 10th century by Odo I, Count of Blois. After Pierre d'Amboise rebelled against Louis XI, the king ordered the castle's destruction. Later in the 15th century Château de Chaumont was rebuilt by Charles I d'Amboise. Protected as a monument historique since 1840, the château was given into state ownership in 1938 and is now open to the public.
The Tuileries Garden is a public garden between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, France. Created by Catherine de' Medici as the garden of the Tuileries Palace in 1564, it was opened to the public in 1667 and became a public park after the French Revolution. Since the 19th century, it has been a place for Parisians to celebrate, meet, stroll and relax.
The English landscape garden, also called English landscape park or simply the English garden, is a style of "landscape" garden which emerged in England in the early 18th century, and spread across Europe, replacing the more formal, symmetrical French formal garden which had emerged in the 17th century as the principal gardening style of Europe. The English garden presented an idealized view of nature. Created and pioneered by William Kent and others, the "informal" garden style originated as a revolt against the architectural garden and drew inspiration from paintings of landscapes by Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, and Nicolas Poussin.
André Le Nôtre, originally rendered as André Le Nostre, was a French landscape architect and the principal gardener of King Louis XIV of France. He was the landscape architect who designed the gardens of the Palace of Versailles; his work represents the height of the French formal garden style, or jardin à la française.
Alice Raingo Hoschedé Monet was the wife of department store magnate and art collector Ernest Hoschedé and later of the Impressionist painter Claude Monet.
The French formal garden, also called the jardin à la française, is a style of "landscape" garden based on symmetry and the principle of imposing order on nature. Its epitome is generally considered to be the Gardens of Versailles designed during the 17th century by the landscape architect André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV and widely copied by other European courts.
Gardens of the French Renaissance were initially inspired by the Italian Renaissance garden, which evolved later into the grander and more formal jardin à la française during the reign of Louis XIV, by the middle of the 17th century.
The Potager du roi, near the Palace of Versailles, produced fresh vegetables and fruits for the table of the court of Louis XIV. It was created between 1678 and 1683 by Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie, the director of the royal fruit and vegetable gardens. Today it is run by the École nationale supérieure du paysage, the grande école for landscape architects. It is officially recognized as a Remarkable Garden of France.
Blanche Hoschedé Monet was a French painter who was both the stepdaughter and the daughter-in-law of Claude Monet.
The Baroque garden was a style of garden based upon symmetry and the principle of imposing order on nature. The style originated in the late-16th century in Italy, in the gardens of the Vatican and the Villa Borghese gardens in Rome and in the gardens of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, and then spread to France, where it became known as the jardin à la française or French formal garden. The grandest example is found in the Gardens of Versailles designed during the 17th century by the landscape architect André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV. In the 18th century, in imitation of Versailles, very ornate Baroque gardens were built in other parts of Europe, including Germany, Austria, Spain, and in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. In the mid-18th century the style was replaced by the less geometric and more natural English landscape garden.
The Fondation Claude Monet is a nonprofit organisation that runs and preserves the house and gardens of Claude Monet in Giverny, France, where Monet lived and painted for 43 years. Monet was inspired by his gardens, and spent years transforming them, planting thousands of flowers. He believed that it was important to surround himself with nature and paint outdoors. He created many paintings of his house and gardens, especially of water lilies in the pond, the Japanese bridge, and a weeping willow tree.
Paris today has more than 421 municipal parks and gardens, covering more than three thousand hectares and containing more than 250,000 trees. Two of Paris's oldest and most famous gardens are the Tuileries Garden, created in 1564 for the Tuileries Palace, and redone by André Le Nôtre in 1664; and the Luxembourg Garden, belonging to a château built for Marie de' Medici in 1612, which today houses the French Senate. The Jardin des Plantes was the first botanical garden in Paris, created in 1626 by Louis XIII's doctor Guy de La Brosse for the cultivation of medicinal plants. Between 1853 and 1870, the Emperor Napoleon III and the city's first director of parks and gardens, Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, created the Bois de Boulogne, the Bois de Vincennes, Parc Montsouris and the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, located at the four points of the compass around the city, as well as many smaller parks, squares and gardens in the neighborhoods of the city. One hundred sixty-six new parks have been created since 1977, most notably the Parc de la Villette (1987–1991) and Parc André Citroën (1992).
Michel Monet was the second son of Claude Monet and Camille Doncieux Monet.
Baroness Gabriëlle Andrée van Zuylen van Nyevelt van de Haar was a French landscape architect, garden designer, garden writer and a member of the International Best Dressed Hall of Fame List since 1978. "Baroness Gabrielle van Zuylen personifies the charm and elegance", according to the French magazine L'ŒIL.
Orsan Priory, alternatively the Priory of Our Lady of Orsan, is a former nunnery belonging to the Order of Fontevraud, located in the Loire Valley, in Maisonnais, Cher, France. It was founded at the beginning of the 12th century by Robert of Arbrissel and dissolved in the French Revolution. It is now (2021) a privately owned hotel with attached traditional monastic gardens created in the 1990s.
Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie was a French lawyer, gardener and agronomist who served under Louis XIV. Named director of the royal fruit and vegetable gardens by the king in 1670, he created between 1678 and 1683 the Potager du roi near the Palace of Versailles.
Jean-Pierre Gilson is a French landscape photographer. His work is held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou and Centre régional de la photographie Hauts-de-France.