Chic garden escapes in the Loire Valley in France

By Kylie O"Brien, Gardening and Property editor Published: 7:00AM GMT twenty-eight February 2010

Photo: DEREK HARRIS

Anyone formulation a garden-visiting legal holiday abroad should cruise the short outing opposite the Channel and down, past Paris, to the fruitful Loire region.

It is fabulously romantic, dirty with famous, fairy-tale châteaux and off-white fortresses - Chambord, Cheverny, Beauregard and Chenonceau in between them - with their geometric hedges and parterres de broderies (literally, festooned parterres).

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It"s no warn that the Loire is additionally home to the palace on that Sleeping Beauty was based, Château d"Uss.

But it"s the gardens that are a revelation. The area has a prolonged convention of horticulture. The land is abounding alluvial soil, most of that is so sandy that borders looks some-more similar to dark-coloured, plumped-up silt dunes than earth.

Yet it provides pleasing flourishing material, fed by the Loire and Loiret rivers.

Chaumont festival

Top of your list should be the palace and drift of Chaumont-sur-Loire, nearby Blois, that hosts a pretentious grassed area legal holiday from open to late autumn.

Set in reserve a total day, as there is rank and file to see. The legal holiday includes twenty to thirty show gardens by designers opposite the universe (think Chelsea Flower Show for peculiarity and Hampton Court for the clarity of space).

The gardens sojourn in situ all season, sensitively flourishing and tended by the showground"s 6 gardeners, so a late-summer revisit would show them at their best.

Every accessible space has been planted up by the shrewd gardeners, who, rather than throw afar plants at the finish of the season, reposition them in what have turn outrageous borders in between.

The outcome is extensive - the grasses generally are spectacular, since copiousness of room to building and spread.

The lawns nearby the opening were planted with prolonged strips of gaura, stipas and Pennisetum villosum, airy, poetic and très chic.

The big reward of grassed area on vacation in France is the stately restaurants and cafs - at Chaumont, don"t miss the Le Grand Velum, with mouthwatering floral-themed meals (why can"t the British mix culinary with cultivation of gardens the approach the French do?).

• Chaumont-sur-Loire, International Garden Festival (00 33 (02) 5420 9922, domaine-chaumont.fr•

Best of the rest

Classic château gardens

About nineteen miles from Orlans and surrounded by cereal crops and forest, the Château de Chamerolles (02 3839 8466; loiret.com), at Chilleurs-aux-Bois, is all fairy-tale turrets, with brick-sided moat, 6 geometric gardens and park.

The château was paid for by the dialect in 1987, and the gardens recreated as outside bedrooms with parterres de broderies, a maze, scented garden, a unfeeling tract and ridicule plantings of sunflowers, nicotiana and castor oil plants.

It"s value on vacation the small chapel with Protestant inscriptions and the palace itself for the bedrooms (which are surprisingly cosy) flashy in opposite chronological styles.

Admirers of the good French convention of fruit- tree precision should revisit Château de Talcy (02 5481 0301, talcy.monuments-nationaux.fr), fifteen miles from Blois.

The palace dates from the 1500s and has a country charm, suggestive of a grand West Country manor. It has an orchard of apples and pears inside of a 17-acre walled garden, that was easy in 1996 formed on repository of the strange gardens.

Look for the elementary nonetheless in effect plantings of perovskia and Verbena bonariensis. Lovely.

Collectors" garden

Down a prolonged wooded expostulate in the center of the Orlans forest, the Arboretum des Grandes Bruyères (02 3857 1261, arboretumdesgrandesbruyeres.fr) was combined in the Sixties by Madame de la Rochefoucauld, who can usually be described as a force of nature.

It has been a little undertaking: set in some-more than 50 acres, the trees are widely separated in to geographical origins, together with glantings from the Americas, an ""Everglades"" area with engulf cypresses and fanciful pines.

For roses

For the perfect romance, revisit the Rose Garden at Roquelin (06 7095 3770, lesjardinsde roquelin.com) at Meung-sur-Loire. This is one for June. Relatively small (2 acres), it is ripping with 450 varieties of especially old roses, with a pond, ducks and a unfeeling plot. Inspired by English planting (delphiniums, buddleias, and copiousness of pennisetums and salvias) it has quirky, spontaneous touches.

The owner, Monsieur Chassine (who by the approach looks similar to Jeremy Irons), says his prime roses for rock climbing are Madame Alfred Carrière, and Ghislaine de Fligonde - combined in Orlans in 1916. And for planting at the bottom of a wall, Pierre de Ronsard; M Chassine has it flowering blowsily at the bottom of his farmhouse.

Public grassed area

Another revelation: the La Source floral play ground (02 3849 3000; parcfloraldelasource.fr), south of Orlans, is a masterclass in open planting that will greatfully the crowds, children, family and plantsmen.

Created in 1963, on 86 acres, set in reserve a couple of hours to visit; in between the highlights were the fuchsia collection, iris grassed area (which forms a inhabitant collection), cloud-pruned cedars, and dahlias. It was stately when I visited in late summer, but target for the iris and clematis deteriorate and it would be really heaven.