Le Jardin de Fougères

Posted by Rosie

As I wrote about on Monday we recently spent a day in Fougères, a medieval town about an hour and a half from Eco-Gites of Lenault.  It had a large and varied market, some great architecture and this fabulous castle:

Fougères Castle

It also has some delightful gardens with a great range of floral displays.  

These grasses growing above the lower herbaceous border reminded me of fireworks and with a theme of De l'ombre à la lumière (from darkness to light) maybe this was the intention!

Grass fireworks?

The soft, curved planting in front of the more angular church made an interesting comparison but we have to say we had no idea why the aeroplane/large insect sculpture was there!

Fougères Town Gardens

On a more formal note we assume this is the town crest for Fougères.  It is beautifully detailed and maintained so well.

Fougères Town Crest

These unusual umbelliferous plants caught my eye. I thought at first they were wild carrot but I don't think they were and with the amount we saw they must have been planted rather than a pleasant weed invasion!  The spiralling of the flower heads was so pretty and not something I had seen before. 

Did you also know that all all umbellifer plants including plants such as cow parsley, carrot, parsnip and dill bear hundreds of flowers.  Each flower head like this, is in fact made up of hundreds of tiny individual flowers?  A closer inspection will reveal that what might at first apear to be just a petal is in fact a whole flower complete with all the relevant parts that I learnt about at school but have now mostly forgotten!

Hundreds of flowers

To reach the castle and medieval town from the more modern town you need to climb down a steep hill.  The gardens continue all the way down the slope and include this formal French knot garden perched high over the old buildings below.  I pity the people who had to flatten out this area to create this garden and the person who has to clip the hedges now!

The flowers were not just restricted to the town gardens and this orange and blue bed near the castle entrance also caught my eye - I just love the colour combination that managed to shine out despite it being a relatively dull day.

I should be back with more garden updates form the garden hear at Eco-Gites of Lenault next week.  Now though, for more garden blogs why not head on over to the How Does Your garden grow linky run by Annie over at Manneskjur: