Travel Stories: Chateau de Villandry, France Tour 2019

July 11, 2019 Susan

On June 11, my tour group and I visited the spectacular Chateau de Villandry. Chances are you’ve seen photos of the gardens here and put it on your bucket list. Well, this was my second visit to the chateau and gardens and it was even more magnificent than I remembered!

This chateau was built next to the Loire River in the 1500s. It is considered to be in the French style with its very elegant architecture. It began as a Medieval fortress, parts of which were razed; after that, defensive walls were erected. In the 18th century, the building was transformed by the Marquis de Castellane. By the late 1800s, the estate was in disrepair and restored by Joachim Carvallo and Ann Coleman in the early 1900s. The current owner is Henri Carvallo.

The garden features include the potager (kitchen garden), sun garden, ornamental garden and the water garden. I remember being completely enamored with the kitchen garden on my previous visit. It is stunning, with every bed symmetrically planted with perfect, uniform vegetables.

What I didn’t know at that time was that it is purely a display garden because the food produced here is not eaten. The head gardener is Laurent Portuguez. But the great thing is that everything is grown organically: they use predatory insects and nematodes, they’ve added 4 beehives, there are no synthetic fertilizers or fungicides used, they don’t use glyphosate (the active ingredient found in RoundUp) to control weeds, and they make their own compost. Ninety species of birds are seen here, and Villandry has been granted refuge status for their work in protecting these birds.

You can learn more about Chateau de Villandry by visiting their website. Now let me share a few photos from our visit. I think you’ll agree Villandry is fabulous! Remember that you can click on any of the photos to view a much larger image (and you might want to start with the rose photo at the upper left; it’s my favorite one and am glad it turned out!)