Gardens Near and Far (2017 - 2017)

Agdal, Morocco, nestled between the Atlas Mountains and the Djebilet desert, the Agdal garden is an oasis of more than 500 hectares surrounded by ramparts, next to Marrakech. Jean-Philippe Teyssier, a landscape architect, takes us on a journey to discover the most beautiful gardens in the world.

Set within 3,5 hectares (8 acres) of cultivated fruit and vegetables, the big garden at Babylonstoren is at the heart of the farm. It was inspired by the historic Company’s Garden in Cape Town, which supplied sailing ships of the Dutch East India Company with fresh vegetables and fruit during the days when the Cape was a halfway station between Europe and Asia. But we also link back to the mythological hanging gardens of Babylon. Those were thought to have been created by Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century BC, for his wife who longed for the mountains and valleys of her youth.

Bagh-e Fin, Iran – The town of Kashan, in the middle of the desert, 250 kilometres from Tehran, is home to the oldest remaining Persian garden. It was Shah Abbas the Great who ordered its construction in 1587, with the aim of reproducing the gardens described in the Quran, symbolising paradise.

In 1705, architect John Vanbrugh and gardener Henry Wise designed the garden in Blenheim, in Britain. It symbolised the political and military power of the Duke of Marlborough. Sixty years later, Capability Brown reworked the estate, reshaping the landscape into the image of a romantic painting.

A garden located on the Normandy Coast, in the style of an English garden. Unique in France, it was designed by a renowned English landscaper and architect.

The Casa de Mateus baroque palace and grounds, nestle among vineyards near the Douro valley, in northern Portugal.

Silence, minimalism and symbolic meaning reign in the Japanese Zen garden. Stone lanterns, purifying basins and white rocks and pebbles are meticulously designed and laid out.

Dumbarton Oaks was designed in the 1920s by Beatrix Farrand, who pioneered landscape gardening in the USA. It comprises four hectares of gardens and eleven hectares of grounds and woodland, set in a wealthy neighbourhood on the heights of Washington DC.

In Munich, the “Englisher Garten” was designed a century before the other great urban gardens of Europe. In 1789 – while the French Revolution makes European courts tremble – Prince Charles-Theodore of Bavaria decided to offer his people a magnificent public garden.

The gardens of the palace of the Alcazar in Seville were built in the 9th century by a succession of monarchs, both Muslim and Christian, who created a place of rare beauty.

The discreet and elegant gardens of the Madonna’s Greenhouse are in the image of their creator, Major Johnston, an Englishman who was passionate about botany. A few kilometres away, Baroness Beatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild had her gardens landscaped into a place dedicated to worldly pleasures. These two gardens are now open to the public.

Opened in 1857 before the works were completed, the park was designed by the Bulher brothers, who came up with the smart idea of digging out a lake to sanitize the swampland.

Designed in the style of André Le Nôtre in 1760 by Canon Guillaume de Beaufort-Spontin and enlarged by his brother Philippe in 1770, the gardens are set on walled terraces on the left bank of the Meuse. Freyr Castle and its timeless gardens stand in the heart of a natural site, in which a vast forest surrounds a series of breathtaking rocks and a river that sculpts the valley.

Water is omnipresent in Courances, and it structures the landscape. The area’s trees give it a highly romantic character.

Partly dug out in the chalk cliffs along a bend in the River Seine, the castle of La Roche Guyon overlooks an outstanding vegetable and fruit garden.

A few kilometres from Paris, the Vallée aux Loups spans more than 60 hectares of isolated woodland. In the 19th century, it attracted prestigious gardeners and many artists.

In 1811, Prince Hermann von Pückler, one of the leading 19th century landscape gardeners, decided to dedicate his life to creating the ideal estate, in which he experimented with new forms of landscape.

In the 17th century, William III of Orange and his wife Mary II acquired the estate of Het Loo, creating over 650 hectares of woodland and parkland, in an outstanding garden inspired by the French baroque gardens of the time.

Located in North East of Italy, in the heart of Veneto, the garden of Padua is the oldest botanical garden in the world. Founded in 1545, it dates back to the origin of botanical science.

The Valsanzibio gardens, located in the heart of the Southern Padua hills, span eight hectares. The gardens are the work of the Barbarigo family, who were wealthy 17th century Venetian traders.

The Villa d’Este near Rome in Italy was a model for all Renaissance gardens that followed.

By the twelfth century, the ancient settlement of Ninfa had become a sizeable town with a castle. The noble Caetani family were granted the fiefdom. But the town’s population was decimated by civil wars in the fourteenth century, then driven out by malaria.

This baroque garden is decorated with thousands of small mosaic tiles, the famous “Azulejos” that recount the glory of the re-conquest of the independence of Portugal in the 16th century.

Created in the 16th century in Sinta, 40 km from Lisbon, the Quinta da Regaleira was a garden for the acclimatization of exotic plants that the Portuguese navigators brought back from their travels to Asia and the Americas.

The Domaine du Rayol is a surprising 20-hectare garden in which exotic plants live in harmony with Mediterranean scrubland.

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The Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh was established in 1670, at the time of the British Empire’s major expeditions.

Spanning 34 hectares, the Maria Luisa Park, which is a mosaic of gardens, constitutes the lungs of the city of Seville. It was opened to the public in 1914.

This garden, located in the south of England, reveals a wild side of nature, with its abundance of flowering perennials. It was designed by champion of the “wild garden” William Robinson.

Out on cape Mortola – between Menton and Ventimiglia – the Hanbury garden will mesmerize you with its beautiful landscapes. This classified site protects the Italian coast on about 6 kilometers. The splendor of nineteenth century botanical gardens combines harmoniously with exotic species imported from the world over.

At the intersection of the old city and the vast new city, the garden of Jnan Sbil, meaning “paradise” in Arabic, stretches for over 7 hectares. The city of Fez, in the North of Morocco, possesses the world’s largest Medina.

With its lake, its waterfalls and its 8000 trees belonging to 18 different species, this vast garden is one of the most beautiful in Japan. Kenroku-en, meaning the garden of six virtues, is in the city of Kanazawa.

On the volcanic island of Ischia – in the gulf of Naples – the la Mortella domain’s tropical vegetation is surprisingly lively. Paths have been carved in volcanic rock and are flanked by Mediterranean essences.

Levens Hall, in the north of England, has belonged to the same family for 800 years. Its garden was laid out in the seventeenth century by a French garden designer, Guillaume Beaumont, who trained with André Le Nôtre at Versailles.

The Little Sparta garden is South of Edinburgh and lost in the Pentland. It was Ian Hamilton Finlay’s art piece of a lifetime. The late twentieth century Scottish poet and artist was an influent member of the experimental movement referred to as “concrete poetry”.

Longwood Gardens, in Pennsylvania, is famous for its European architectural style and the diversity of its flower beds.

Made in the 1920s by the English society hostess Edith Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Marchioness of Londonderry, who played a major organizational role in World War I, this Northern Irish garden defies categorization.

The garden of Murin-An, in central Kyoto, was made in the late nineteenth century by Aritomo Yamagata, a wealthy statesman.

This Irish garden has witnessed four centuries of history. Initially designed for the Wingfield family in the eighteenth century, the grounds of Powerscourt were the creation of the English architect and landscape designer Daniel Robertson.

Sprawling on 5 hectares, Rosendal is a food and flower garden at the heart of Stockholm. It has been in perpetual evolution for 200 years: it is a model garden for Sweden. The exceptional nature of the Rosendal garden is explained by its situation in the city; it is located in the island of Djurgarden – which is 27 square kilometers large – flanked by the waters of the Baltic sea and linked to the town center by multiple bridges.

The Sacred Grove, a mysterious garden to the North East of Rome, was created in the 1550s by Vicino Orsini, Lord of Bomarzo, who worked on beautifying it until his death in 1584.

At the heart of the English countryside in Gloucestershire, north-west of Oxford, the Sezincote estate houses a surprising dwelling. It is the work of the Cockerell brothers – British aristocrats of the end of the eighteenth century.

Built between 1912 and 1921, the floating gardens of Taman Ujung are the work of King Anak Agung, the last king to govern the region of East Bali.

Augustus John Smith – 26 years old rich aristocrat decided to sow a subtropical garden, the “Tresco Abbey Garden”. The Scilly archipelago can be found in the Celtic sea, off the coast of England… The windy island of Tresco saw Augustus John Smith arrive at the beginning of the nineteenth century.