Ten Favourite Parks and Gardens in Paris Region
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- Ten Favourite Parks and Gardens in Paris Region
If you’re traveling to Paris, take advantage of the region’s numerous parks and gardens to enjoy a relaxing moment. Château gardens, botanical gardens, rose gardens, vegetable gardens… Get a little greenery into your life and admire the finest plants and trees the Paris Region has to offer. Whether you like your gardens formal, landscaped, square or Japanese-style, there is something for you!
Our favourite château gardens in Paris Region
The Paris Region has an incredibly rich history and boasts a number of magnificent châteaux. Often surrounded by vast parks and landscaped gardens, these estates are the perfect places for a bucolic stroll in the footsteps of some of the greatest names in French history.
The most majestic of the castle gardens is of course the Château de Versailles. Created by Le Nôtre to glorify Louis XIV the Sun King, the gardens of Versailles represent the pinnacle of formal French-style gardening, with classic groves and geometric perspectives. From spring through autumn, visitors can also enjoy the Musical Fountains and the Musical Gardens shows here.
For a long time thought to be the work of Le Nôtre, the gardens at the Château de Courances were in fact created a century earlier. They are emblematic of Renaissance water gardens and offer a bucolic setting for a promenade. In the summer, the pools, canals and numerous fountains provide welcome coolness.
At Vaux-le-Vicomte, the 17th-century château built at the request of Nicolas Fouquet is surrounded by 33 hectares of gardens. These French-style formal gardens in the middle of the countryside offer a wonderful vantage point, with scenery stretching some 3 kilometres into the distance. The beautifully presented gardens of Vaux-le-Vicomte offer an enchanting setting for a family stroll amid ponds and flowerbeds.
Our favourite vegetable gardens in Paris Region
Gardens can be purely ornamental, but they can also be used as a source of food and medicines. Discover our selection of vegetable gardens in Paris Region, where vegetables sit alongside flowers and aromatic plants in highly orderly arrangements. As an added bonus, the produce is often on sale to visitors: a treat for your tastebuds!
Created by Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie to supply the tables of the Sun King, the King’s Kitchen Garden at Versailles grows an impressive number of fruits and vegetables, often rare or little-known, and maintains historic pruning techniques for its fruit trees.
With its square beds planted with vegetables and flowers typical of the 17th century, the Saint-Jean de Beauregard Kitchen Garden is one of the rare flowering kitchen gardens to have survived intact up to the present day. The rare or forgotten flowers, fruits and vegetables grown here have brought the estate wide renown.
At the gothic Royaumont Abbey, the largest Cistercian abbey in the region, the medievally inspired gardens contain aromatic and medicinal plants and also a vegetable garden and orchard..
Our favourite rose gardens in the Paris Region
The queen of ornamental flowers and the quintessential symbol of love, the rose has entire gardens devoted to it. Come and admire these flowers in all their red, white or yellow glory in two Paris Region rose gardens.
Located in the bois de Boulogne, the parc de Bagatelle is a green setting that transports you out of time into a haven of plant tranquility. Its paths are home to several gardens, including an exceptional rose garden, one of the oldest in France, whose flowers you can admire from May to October. An enchanting stroll for lovers of classic and modern roses.
The great park of the medieval city of Provins is home to the Provins Rose Garden, which offers visitors a chance to wander among 450 varieties of ancient and modern roses. The most famous, Rosa gallica officinalis, also known as “Rose de Provins”, was brought back from the Crusades in 1240 by Thibaud IV of Champagne and has become one of the symbols of the town.
Our favourite botanical gardens in Paris Region
Paris is packed with botanical treasures. Stroll along the paths and through the greenhouses of these veritable open-air museums to admire plant and tree varieties from the world over, their glowing colours changing from season to season. A palette of tones and hues that can be found only in nature.
Still today, the Jardin des Plantes, home to the National Museum of Natural History, upholds its four-century-long mission to spread botanical knowledge. Originally the Royal Garden of Medicinal Plants, the park divides its rich natural heritage across 11 different gardens.
In the garden of the Albert Kahn Museum in Boulogne Billancourt, set off on a journey around the world of plants. Discover the mountainous landscapes of Europe, the plains of America and Japan in a space created to admire nature and the multitude of its plant varieties..
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- Copyright image: CRT IDF/Tripelon-Jarry