A new coffee table book toured France's most beautiful gardens, and four of them stand out as genuinely visit-worthy — each with a surprising backstory involving royalty, fashion designers, and a famous red-soled shoe.
In the Cher countryside, the Prieuré d'Orsan at Maisonnais is a medieval priory reborn as a garden. Founded in the 12th century by Robert d'Arbrissel — who left his heart here and his body at Fontevraud — it survived wars and revolution before architects Patrice Taravella and Sonia Lesot bought it in the 1990s with 40 hectares of land and rebuilt it as a garden of pleached walks and raised wattle beds, using long-forgotten medieval techniques. Since 2017 it has belonged to English fashion designers Gareth Casey and Cyril Pearon, who added a tearoom serving lunches and teas plus a shop selling tools, juices and homemade jams. It's held the jardin remarquable label since 2004.
In Brittany, the Jardins de Kerdalo near Trédarzec spill down the steep valley of the Jaudy river, facing Tréguier. Prince Peter Wolkonsky created it from a former farm in 1965, working with leading nurserymen to paint 18 hectares with seasonal colour. His daughter Isabelle and her husband Timothy Vaughan restored it after brutal storms in 1987 and 1999, and since 2021 the owner has been Christian Louboutin — a Breton-raised shoe designer who studied landscape gardening before his stiletto fame. A tearoom, Cherree on the Cake, opened in a former conservatory in April 2024 serving Anglo-Breton pastries.
Down in the Dordogne, the Jardins du Manoir d'Eyrignac at Salignac-Eyvigues is topiary on a grand scale: around 300 clipped yew, box, cypress and hornbeam shapes across 10 hectares of green rooms and broderie parterres, each trimmed by hand with shears. The formal 18th-century gardens were ripped out for an English landscape style in the 1800s, then painstakingly recreated from 1965 by Gilles Sermadiras, who hunted down traces of the original layout. His son Patrick continues the work, and the manor has been a historic monument since 1986.
Finally, in Cassel in the Nord, Emmanuel de Quillacq's Jardin du Mont des Récollets (or Wouwenberg) revives the Flemish garden style immortalised by Rubens, Van Eyck and Brueghel. On just 1.5 hectares it packs in 22 small green rooms walled by hedges, with brick and blue stone, water features, round windows cut into hedgerows framing views of the surrounding fields.
Together they make a fine template for a garden-themed road trip through France — and unlike many grand château gardens, several of these are intimate, personal creations where you'll often meet the owners' vision up close, sometimes over tea and cake.
