The gardens of the Palace of Versailles are immense, covering about 1200 hectares (the botanic gardens in Sydney and Melbourne by way of comparison only occupy around 30 hectares). The central axis of the garden, which focuses on the palace, is 8km (five miles) long.
The gardens, which were built for Louis XIV and completed in 1687, have been extremely influential. They have been a model for many other famous European gardens and can even be seen to have influenced the design of our own capital city, Canberra.
In their heyday these gardens employed 20,000 staff. There were so many fountains in the garden at Versailles that they actually used more water than the city of Paris. They were built for entertaining and strolling in – the Palace of Versailles was always a residence, not a seat of government.
Features of the garden include a parterre garden, a giant canal (with a nearly 5km circumference it is large enough for sailing and staging mock battles) and a series of ‘fantasy rooms’ such as a Baroque Italian amphitheatre, a feast room and a man-made grotto. All this was created on naturally flat, featureless ground.
French Renaissance gardening, of which the garden at the Palace of Versailles is a supreme example, proposes the argument that man could conquer the universe, that where there is disorder he can create order, where there is danger he can create safety and where plants couldn’t possibly grow, they can be grown. No where is this more clearly seen than in the orangery, where 3000 plants including palms (a later addition) and orange trees grow. To survive the winter these plants, which could not survive the cold temperatures, are physically picked up and moved indoors to an area which is maintained to a minimum of 6