The Road to Le Tholonet by Monty Don

Author:Monty Don [Don, Monty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471114595
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Although subsequently dwarfed by Versailles, Vaux is an enormous garden, thirty-three hectares in its full extent, including a 3.5-hectare walled garden that is no longer used. 76 As you walk through the front door, across the hallway beneath the cupola, glimpses of black and white diamond marble floors stretching either side with gold and glass catching the light within the brocaded recesses, towards the tiny figure of Hercules on the horizon directly ahead, you arrive at a vast rectangular plat, gently curving away, bounded by tall trees on either side so there is nothing visible but garden or sky in every direction. The ornate parterres de broderie, the low box brocade patterned against red gravel, flank a central path that seems to lead directly to a grotto at the foot of a grassy slope. But it is a long way away. There are pools and fountains, topiary and, in Fouquet’s day, before Louis got vengeful, statues lining the path.

Broad canals, hidden from the house, turn left and right from the first central pool, leading to the Grille d’Eau in one direction and the entrance to the walled garden in the other.

The miroir, a huge square basin in which the house is perfectly reflected (or so I am told. It was cloudy and sunless on both occasions that I visited) is invisible as you walk down, yet looking back at the house from it, it seems to be the centrepiece of the entire garden that everything else revolves around.

The garden on the one hand seems laid out with complete visual accessibility, like a monstrous parterre, but on the other hand is constantly revealing itself and unfolding. Drop below it to the basin de cascades at the bottom of the huge grotto and the enormous Grand Canal stretches right across the garden.

To get to the grotto and Hercules, now looking down on you from the other side of what has revealed itself to be a gentle valley, you have to walk right round one of the ends, although on the night of Nicolas Fouquet’s party Louis and other favoured guests were ferried across in a boat. I went right round the western stretch, which is a long and, had it not started raining hard, beautiful walk. Had I checked my map I would have seen it is better to go up to the Confessional with its massive grass platform flanked by broad hedges on stilts and then walk down to the eastern end where the round pool (so boats can turn) filled with enormous brown fish thicker than a thigh, leads you round either back to the grotto or diagonally up through the trees to the clearing before Hercules.

The garden at Vaux is based upon surprise as the main element of delight. Surprise itself as a weapon of garden design had been used for the previous hundred years but Le Nôtre broke the mould at Vaux by the scale and ease with which it is done. Rather than just spraying the visitor

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