Garden festival planner: Chaumont-sur-Loire Garden Festival

The Loire Valley is renowned as ‘France’s Garden’.

In summer it hosts an international design festival that imagines the future of gardening.

 

Chaumont wrestles with new ideas in gardens.

Chaumont-sur-Loire Garden Festival

Loire Valley, France

April - October 2018

 

Every year since 1992, the gorgeous Renaissance castle of Chaumont-sur-Loire has hosted a garden festival with a difference. Designers from around the world contribute a garden based around a theme, and plant it up to last for the six months of the festival. This year the organisers quote the French philosopher and novelist Erik Orsenna - ‘gardens are philosophy made visible’ - and ask designers to use imagination and ‘every technical possibility’ to create gardens of wonder that reference the links between gardens, literature and thought. ‘Pansy’ they remind us, comes from ‘pensee,’ the French word for ‘thought’. Twenty designs will be built from the more than 300 entries submitted. As well as the 20 gardens, visitors can explore the chateau and its extensive grounds, and in July and August, stay late, with the gardens lit up from 10pm til midnight.

 

Photo - Stefano Marinaz.

 

 

 

Gardens to visit

Château de Villandry

Famous for its spectacular formal potager, which is replanted twice a year, the gardens here also feature parterres planted in the form of symbols of love - fickle, tender, passionate and tragic. Get a sense of the whole place by exploring the chateau (and its small but exquisite art collection) and viewing the gardens from the tower before getting to grips with ground level.

 

 

Chateau de Bourdaisiere

Visit August to September to see the highlights here. In the 19th-century walled kitchen garden more than 400 varieties of tomatoes are grown with other edibles and flowers, and served fresh at the Tomato Bar, from where there is a great view of the 200 named varieties in dahlia gardens. Book a room - the chateau is a three-star hotel - and enjoy the gardens to yourself before the day-trippers arrive.

 

Three of the 200 named varieties of dahlia at Chateau de Bourdaisiere.

Chenonceaux

The chateau on the banks of the Loire is beautiful, and so are the gardens. Dahlias, alstroemerias, cleomes, celosia and amaranthus are grown for cutting and are displayed in vases in the chateau.

 

 

The glorious gardens of romantic Chenonceaux.

Where to stay:

Hotel la Roseraie, Chenonceaux

The creeper-covered, 18th-century stone house is French romance is a nutshell, and there is also a swimming pool and good value restaurant in this comfortable 15-room hotel down the road from the chateau.