Chateau and Jardins de Villandry

Day five wasn't quite over yet. We had another chateau visit to make on our way back home for the night. This time we weren't quite as interested in seeing the chateau as we were in seeing the gardens.


I won't even bother telling you about the history of this place as we skipped right over the castle and headed out into the many gardens. You can see an aerial view of the complex here.

We began in the vegetable garden. If I were to have a vegetable garden, I'd definitely want it to look like this one!


At the entrance to each little section of vegetable garden there was a sign with a map detailing all the various plants used in that garden.


The vegetable garden is composed of nine separate squares, each with its own geometric pattern. There are various places on the property where you can get high enough to see the patterns. These shot was taken from the herb garden, located above and adjacent to the veg garden.


We continued through the Herb Garden and on to the maze. I think we skipped this particular maze and moved right on in to the Sun Garden. It was a little more "wild" than the vegetable and herb gardens. There were two themes in this garden. One was "sun", with red and orange and yellow flowers, and the other was "cloud" with blue and purple flowers.


After the Sun Garden, we walked the border of the Water Garden.


After walked past the Water Garden, we took a path up a hill and into the woods. It eventually led back to a high wall with a promenade area from which you could look over the grounds.


You could see down into the Love Garden from the overlook. The Love Garden is broken into four areas, each representing a different type of Love. Each of the four areas has a different stylized symbol and color. Starting in the upper left in the photo below is Tender Love (pink hearts), then going clockwise, we have Passionate, Fickle, and Tragic Love (red daggers).


And that ended our visit at Villandry. We hopped back in our car and headed back to our chateau via the city of Tours. We decided to stop at one of the huge supermarkets, E. Leclerc, in Tours to do our grocery shopping for the rest of our stay in the Loire. We always have fun exploring supermarkets in Europe. The cheese and bread selections are amazing, and everything else is a bit of an adventure. On this particular trip, we learned that the French don't refrigerate their milk. We drank plenty of it and lived to tell the tale.