The Royal Gardeners: French Gardens

Fouquet not only had at his command vast wealth, he had the power to attract and bind to himself the greatest creative spirits of his time. Corneille, Moliere, La Fontaine, Le Vau, Le Brun and numberless lesser figures of talent formed his circle and showed the genuineness of their admiration and affection in that when their Maecenas fell they did not fail to mourn him. Looking back over European history we are accustomed to see upon one great creative period the stamp of Le Roi Soleil; it might be more just to speak of the age of Fouquet than that of Louis XIV, though Fouquet spent most of it in a prison cell. At Melun, Fouquet commissioned the architect Le Vau to build him a chateau; for the interior decoration he employed Charles Le Brun; for the design of the garden he called upon Andre Le Notre. Neither of the two greatest names in European gardening, Le Notre and Lancelot Brown (who was the more original genius) originated the style associated with them. Both entered upon the evolutionary phase they found and developed it to the limit. In France appointments to positions in the royal gardens were kept in a few families; Andre Le Notre was promised the reversion of his father's post of Chief Gardener at the Tuileries at the age of 24 and himself ensured the continuance of the office to his nephew Desgots; his grandfather, Pierre Le Notre, seems to have been an under-gardener at the Tuileries in 1572. Two of Andre's sisters married gardeners at the Tuileries, Desgots and Bouchard. At Andre's baptism in 1613 the wife of Claude Mollet was godmother. No family has been of greater influence in the development of gardening than that of Mollet. Claude Mollet was gardener to Henri IV; it was he who told how Du Perac came back from Italy with the idea of the compartiment de broderie, and he who with Du Perac laid out the first such parterre in France at the Chateau of Anet.