Pleurtuit · Ille-et-Vilaine
The terraces, parterres and collection park of Montmarin on the Rance
Built in 1760 by the Saint-Malo shipowner Aaron Magon, Montmarin keeps the terraces of its original garden — known from the 1775 Carte des Côtes de France and a 1782 inventory — restored parterres, and a lower landscape park that has become a collector’s garden; terraces, parterres and gardens were classified in 1966 and the whole park in 1995.
From the source
Domaine de Montmarin is a manor house at Pleurtuit, Ille-et-Vilaine, in the Bretagne region of France. The recorded building campaigns date from the 18th and 19th centuries. It is protected as a monument historique at the higher of the two levels (classé). Details are drawn from the Base Mérimée of the French Ministry of Culture.
Editorial reading
The record describes what survives of the garden created in 1760: the general layout of the terraces and a number of trees, among them a Magnolia grandiflora, limes and hornbeam hedges. Neglected during the nineteenth century, the property was bought in 1885 by an ancestor of the present owner, M. Bazin de Jessey, who restored the upper terraces, reinstated the classical parterres and turned the whole lower part into a landscape park of wide lawns and groups of trees. Since then the park has been enriched with many species that give it the interest of a collection garden. The 1966 classification names the cour d’honneur, the terraces, parterres and gardens along the Rance; the 1995 classification adds the enclosure walls, the park, the quay walls with their pavilions and the access avenue.
Recommendation
Three gardens in one descent to the river: eighteenth-century terraces, restored parterres, and a plantsman’s park on the Rance.
Sources
Base Mérimée — immeubles protégés · PA00090657 — Licence Ouverte / Open Licence 2.0 (Etalab) — Ministère de la Culture, base Mérimée
Wikimedia Commons · https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Pleurtuit%20Montmarin.jpg — CC BY-SA 3.0
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