Gardens Follow

This Parisian park was created round a small château in the 1770s as the result, it is said, of a bet between Marie-Antoinette and the Comte d'Artois, whom she challenged to create a garden in two months flat. The Scottish gardener Thomas Blaikie then took on the project and made a picturesque English-style garden, the layout of which remains today -although not all of his panoply of buildings, alas. The heart of the garden, and its most beautiful part, is the rose garden designed in 1905 by Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier. This is a feast for the rosarian, with scores of delectable old French shrub roses in beds and on swags, the whole given structure and height by clipped yew cones.