The Elements of a Classic French-style Garden

Table of Content

• Raised Beds
• The Grand Entrance to Your French Garden
• Ideas to Make an Elegant French Garden
• Growing Oregano: How to Plant, Grow, and Take Care of Oregano
• Scroll saw pattern, French Bulldog planter, Wood Planter, animal planter, laser cutting, digital file, SVG, PDF, DXF
• Versailles: the grandest
Pet Memorial
• How to Humanely Stop Birds from Stealing Seeds and Seedlings in Your Garden

In general, there will be less structure, although gardens will still be contained by a border of some type. Gravel beds will still lead one down the path but to gardens filled with riotous colors. French garden design will also be viewed as a mirror image wherein both sides of the landscape reflect each other. French garden style incorporates neat, defined spaces, a cool color palette, and numerous stone elements as well.

Then divide that area with a line of chives to break up your next patch of 4 x 4 cabbage heads. Repeat that pattern four times so you end up with four patches of 4 x 4 heads for repeating symmetry. Cut to size cattle panels, fence posts and extra fencing, pallets, and other things you already have around the homestead can be used to make the other “walls” of your courtyard. All those outbuildings for storage and livestock can do double duty as the back-drop for your very own courtyard style garden. Or perhaps there are a few collected pots set on either side to create the impression of a path. No matter how it is achieved, the sensation of entering the garden is unquestionable.

Raised Beds

Other decorative features such as urns and stone planters can add texture and a vertical element to your garden. The French country gardening style is comprised of interplay between formal and informal garden elements. The French garden plants commonly used in French garden design vary from severely pruned topiaries to naturally growing flowering trees, vines, and perennials.

Use espaliered fruit trees and groomed boxwoods to make a statement. Other elements to include would be rubble walls, wrought gates, and tall hedges which will instill an element of privacy. When picking French garden plants, use climbing plants such as climbing roses, ivy, grapes, or honeysuckle that will clamber up the house, shed, or wall. A French garden is an edited garden comprised of similar palettes.

The Grand Entrance to Your French Garden

She currently keeps dairy goats, chickens, ducks, a pet turkey, worms, and pigs. She gardens on about two acres and grows a large variety of annual and perennial edible, medicinal, and ecosystem support plants. She is an Extension Master Gardener Volunteer and teaches classes in her community related to Edible Landscaping, Organic Gardening, and Introduction to Permaculture. She has also co-authored several books about backyard chickens, livestock watering systems, and vinegar production.

The French gardeners I met weren’t just keeping shrubs trimmed and relentlessly mowing the lawn the way we did back home. They were cultivating relationships with beloved plants and the landscape around them in their stunningly beautiful French gardens. The same rules of formal French garden style will prevail but where plants would be constrained, they will be unbridled in a French country garden.

Ideas to Make an Elegant French Garden

The round pool with the whimsical elephant fountain was inspired by the landmark gardens at the Rodin museum in Paris. A vibrant mix of boxwood topiaries and Annabelle hydrangeas line the sunny allée. Tucked away on grounds of Versailles, the Trianon served as a private retreat for Louis XV to escape from the chaos of court. The King had embarked on a massive expansion of the Trianon gardens, adding pavilions, a menagerie, and botanical beds cultivated with specimens from all over the world.

Treat fruit trees as if they were vines and train them to cover an ugly fence. They’ll take up barely any space and drop far less fruit to rot on the driveway. The cold, unyielding discipline of an iron bench or pergola will make the surrounding greenery feel all the more lush. Zinc tabletops, corrugated planters, or a rusty watering can draws attention to the texture and softness of leaves and flowers. The difference between 21st-century French gardens and Versailles? So let your squash plants run wild across the lawn; they’ll look like necklaces against velvet.

Home is everything to the cook and cookery writer Mimi Thorisson. Her nineteenth-century house, at the heart of a small and charming village in the Médoc, is the focal point of both her family life and her working day. It is also home to her photographer husband Oddur, their seven children and nine dogs - mostly terriers but also a German shorthaired pointer.

Shops, hotels, restaurants and points of interest for the home and garden obsessed on the go. Ideas to update and improve your outdoor space with hardscaping elements. Add a tailored element to an otherwise messy outdoor space. A tightly clipped ball of boxwood, say, or a path that turns at a right angle will convey the deliberateness of your intentions even if you let a few plants go shaggy. When he bought this private mansion in 1895 in the Hauts-de-Seine, banker Albert Kahn devoted himself to botanical arts, his true passion.

Another way to create the impression of a wall without actually building one is to use espalier techniques to train your trees to look like walls. Espaliered fruit trees are trained similar to grapevines to stretch their arm like branches in a straight line rather than in a vase or central leader format. A stone herb spiral is an interesting alternative to a stone wall and less work.You can also scale down your stone wall idea to a stone bed.

Then, train some vigorously growing vines onto your fences to create a more substantial feel. Tasha Greer Tasha has been an active herb gardener, foodie, and from-scratch cook since the year 2000. In 2014, she started homesteading for greater self-sufficiency in rural Surry County, North Carolina.

Versailles: the grandest

For more Paris gardens, see The Tuileries at Sunset, With Alice Gao. And read about the day that Alexa spentGetting Lost in the Jardin du Palais Royal in Paris. Send me exclusive offers, unique gift ideas, and personalized tips for shopping and selling on Etsy.