Chambord is with the handsome uploaded
About two hours by car from Paris, to the southwest, right at the start of the Châteaux de la Loire route, Chambord stands majestically. It is premiere and, as usually happens in these cases, with the handsome uploaded. The reason? The restoration of its gardens, 6.5 hectares of land that look again as they did back in the eighteenth century , when they saw the light, they explain on their website.
The figures speak for the renovation project, which began in August 2016 and ended in March: 618 trees, 840 shrubs, 176 rose bushes, 15,640 plants to delimit the margins, 18,874 m2 of lawn and 3.5 million euros , which come from the patronage of American philanthropist Stephen Schwarzman.
geometry above all
Geometric, with a very strong aesthetic display and trying to impose order on the surrounding nature, such are the French-style gardens whose objective was to reproduce with this restoration. For this, from the Domaine National de Chambord has invested 16 years in documentation work, geophysical and archaeological surveys, and landscape and architectural studies.
The work-sized result has made it possible to maintain the grid division of the space, with three areas dedicated to the gardens and one to the castle, and the layout of the initial avenues. The changes have been recorded mainly in some of the plant species planted that have had to adapt to the current climatic conditions, very different from those of the beginning of the 16th century, when during the reign of Francis I, during the construction of the castle, the garden began to be designed as a solution to channel the waters of the Cosson river. Nothing was finalized then.
The original layouts have been maintained.
It was not until the reign of Louis XIV, already a century later, that these refurbishment works began in 1684 and until the XVIII to see them finished. The splendor of the gardens was maintained for about two centuries until in the interwar period of the 20th century began to be neglected and were reduced to grass-covered flowerbeds.
detail of the gardens