19. Le jardin bouquetier
In the 17th and 18th centuries, gardeners sold their flowers to bouquetières (flower girls), who were the only people with the right to create and sell bouquets.
Ballrooms, concert halls and theatres – flower girls sneaked in everywhere, with avalanches of white lilies-of-the-valley, baskets of mignonettes, hampers full of velvet-petalled pansies, armfuls of roses and carnations and cartloads of lilacs as their passports. Flowers had a language of their own, and were the most graceful interpreters that nature had made available to humans for discreet expression of their feelings.
The "Jardin Bouquetier" is an invitation to rediscover those forgotten plants, flowers from a bygone age, long fallen out of fashion, but which our grandmothers doubtless used to take pleasure in gathering and composing into delightful bouquets with lyrical names. Here, you’ll find whole bevies of sweet peas, gladiolas, bleeding-hearts, sweet Williams, carnations, clove pinks, amaranth, columbines, cineraria, delphiniums, ragged-ladies, canna lilies, potentilla and other buttercups you can treat your eyes to. Their charm, colours, and sometimes their scent too, won’t fail to cast their spell over you, taking you back to happy childhood days.
So why not give them a second chance? Why not bring them back into today’s gardens and those of tomorrow’s world?
This garden was created by the gardeners of the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire.
