Plouarzel · Finistère
The terraced gardens of Kervéatoux
North of the neo-Gothic château of Kervéatoux, remade in the 1850s and 1880s at Plouarzel, the gardens descend in terraces along an axis: a pleasure garden with a central basin, then the kitchen garden, then the orchard.
From the source
Château de Kervéatoux is a château at Plouarzel, Finistère, in the Bretagne region of France. The recorded building campaigns date from the 15th, 17th and 19th centuries. It is protected as a monument historique at the second level (inscrit). Details are drawn from the Base Mérimée of the French Ministry of Culture.
Editorial reading
The record is precise about the gardens. To the north of the château they are arranged in terraces on an axial composition starting from a first pleasure garden and its central basin; the first terrace holds the kitchen garden, the second the orchard. The landscape park keeps the line of the old approach avenues. The house itself grew from a fifteenth-century L-plan manor, enlarged in the seventeenth century, turned into a farm, and rebuilt as a château around a U-shaped court in the 1850s, probably by the architect Bernier, in a homogeneous neo-Gothic restoration of the 1880s. The 2007 listing names the north garden in terraces — pleasure garden and kitchen garden — alongside the château, dependencies and dovecote.
Recommendation
Three terraces, three uses, one axis: ornament, vegetables, fruit — rarely is a garden’s programme this legible from the house.
Sources
Base Mérimée — immeubles protégés · PA29000057 — Licence Ouverte / Open Licence 2.0 (Etalab) — Ministère de la Culture, base Mérimée
Wikimedia Commons · https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Ch%C3%A2teau%20de%20Kerv%C3%A9atoux%2C%20Plouarzel%2003.JPG — CC BY-SA 3.0
The château by this garden
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