Gardens of Versailles
— — geometry the lawn agreed to.
Not only on a wall.
“Eight hundred hectares of clipped allée, fountain basin, and parterre, laid out by André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV beginning in 1661. The Grand Canal runs more than a mile from the Latona fountain west toward the setting sun, on the axis the king walked. On fountain days the water still moves on a cue sheet that has barely changed in three centuries. UNESCO listed the palace and gardens together in 1979. The trees come down and are replanted on a slow generational cycle.
Gardens of Versailles, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Gardens of Versailles lie west of the Palace of Versailles in Yvelines, about 20 kilometres west of central Paris. The grounds cover roughly 800 hectares, of which 93 are formal gardens. André Le Nôtre began the design in 1661 under Louis XIV and worked on it for nearly four decades; the layout is the defining example of the jardin à la française. The Grand Canal, dug between 1668 and 1679, runs 1,670 metres on the main east-west axis. UNESCO inscribed the Palace and Park of Versailles together in 1979 as one of the great cultural ensembles of Europe.
Versailles was built without a natural water supply on the scale the design wanted. The Machine de Marly, completed in 1684 on the Seine at Bougival, pumped river water more than 150 metres uphill through aqueducts to feed the fountains. The system supplied the Latona basin, the Apollo fountain at the head of the canal, and the bosquet pools scattered through the groves. On Grandes Eaux days the fountains run on a sequenced programme largely inherited from the seventeenth-century cue sheets. The Grand Canal itself was used for naval reviews and gondola excursions in Louis XIV's time.
The gardens are open daily, with a separate fountain-show ticket on the days the basins run (Grandes Eaux Musicales and Jardins Musicaux). RER C from central Paris reaches Versailles Château Rive Gauche in about 40 minutes. The full east-west walk from the palace terrace down to the end of the Grand Canal and back is roughly six kilometres. May and June are the kindest months for the parterres; the autumn light through the allées in October is the gardens' other strong season. Winter closes most of the fountains but the geometry reads more clearly without them.