Customized visits to gardens of major French chateaux and award winning private gardens, including personal invitations to meet the owners of these impressive parklands, stately homes and romantic gardens. Over a cup of tea, drinks or lunch, they will share their gardening history, tastes and interests with you.
Countess Connections designs these garden tours according to the seasons, regions and various plants or places which you particularly wish to discover. During your tailor-made itinerary, you will be:
- Meeting the owners and head gardeners of famous chateau gardens, designed by the likes of Le Nôtre or Edouard André, as well known horticulturists of today and creators of some award winning smaller gardens throughout France.
- Understanding the history of gardens in France, from the formal Jardins à la Française, to their decline under the ideas of Rousseau and the romantic landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Followed by the influence of European visions of Oriental gardens, new plants brought back from explorers such as La Pérouse, and finally the English landscape gardens, which in the early 19th century, gradually replaced the symetrical French formal garden.
- Exploring a great variety of gardens, from medieval herbal gardens to feed cloisters to Renaissance mazes, to the geometric structures of the Grand Siècle with their Grandes Eaux Fountain displays, to topiary gardens, landscape gardens, arboretums, romantic shade gardens and finally present day trendy creations.
- Admiring the generous, colorful and fragrant displays of flowers and vegetables at some of the best Farmers’ markets.
- Enjoying the best of French cuisine, and why not also include a picnic lunch in a romantic shade garden, with produce gleaned from a farmers’ market and a private lunch at a château with the owners’ selection directly from her “potager”.
- Residing in privately owned chateaux and estates, elegant small boutique and five star hotels.
WHY not combine such a garden tour with the Chelsea flower show in May, when everything is in bloom, or with a visit to Southern Spain and the Alhambra of Grenada…
Contact us for samples of current tours available or ask us to design your dream itinerary…
