The King’s Kitchen Garen was built between 1678 and 1683 by Jean-Baptiste La Quintinie, at the request of Louis XIV. Open to the public since 1991, it is the historic site of the national graduate school of landscape.
Classified as a historical monument and a remarkable garden, its gardeners perpetuate the art of pruning and cultivate a wide variety of fruits and vegetables in a French-style garden. Let’s discover together the history of the vegetable garden created to feed the king and his court.
A Creator of Genius
Born in 1626, Jean-Baptiste de la Quintinie studied at the Jesuit College in Poitiers and then at the Faculty of Law in the same city. He then left for the capital where he was admitted as a lawyer at the Parliament of Paris. His literary talents brought him to the attention of Jean Tambonneau, president of the Audit Chamber, who entrusted him with the education of his only son Michel-Antoine. During a trip to Italy with Michel-Antoine, he discovered the Roman gardens and became fascinated by horticulture. He then decided to take up gardening and gave up his job as a lawyer. He was able to practice in the gardens of the Hôtel Tambonneau which were made available to him for horticultural experiments. The knowledge he acquired in this way enabled him to work for great personalities: for Condé in Chantilly, for Colbert in Sceaux, for Mademoiselle de Montpensier in Choisy, and above all for Nicolas Fouquet, then Superintendent of Finances, at the Domaine de Vaux-le-Vicomte.
On September 5, 1661, Nicolas Fouquet was arrested by order of Louis XIV for embezzlement. After this disgrace orchestrated by Colbert, La Quintinie joined the service of Louis XIV alongside Louis Le Vau, architect of Versailles, and André Le Nôtre, gardener to the king. He was in charge of establishing vegetable gardens to provide the king’s table with fruits and vegetables. Thus, he devoted a series of works to plant species, their acclimatization and the care they required.
In 1670, he joined the King’s Civil House under the authority of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, then Secretary of State for the King’s Household, and was given a title specially created for him: Director of the fruit and vegetable gardens of all the royal houses.
Birth of the King’s Kitchen Garden
In 1678, at the request of Louis XIV, La Quintinie undertook the creation of a new kitchen garden which made him even more famous: the King’s Kitchen Garden.
At that time, Versailles was a vast construction site. The castle, the park, the city, but also the installations for the supply of water and fresh products had to be built… Louis XIV was a great lover of peas, but also of asparagus, figs, pears and strawberries. He had them sent to him in baskets when he was on campaign. La Quintinie was thus entrusted with the kitchen garden of Louis XIII, located near the castle. This one quickly became insufficient. La Quintinie wished to set up a new vegetable garden on the good lands of Clagny, but the king wanted it to be close to the castle so that he could visit it easily. The site of “l’étang puant” (the stinking pond) was chosen, a marshy area that needed to be drained.
The creation of the current Potager du roi required one million pounds, five years and the work of thousands of men. The land was filled in with the soil removed to dig the Swiss water feature. It is divided into several sections:
- The Grand Carré in the middle (a central basin and sixteen vegetable squares)
- Twenty-nine enclosed gardens: the Eleven (orchards), the fig garden, the melon garden, the plum garden…
Fruits and vegetables in all seasons
La Quintinie uses cultivation techniques to produce out of season: strawberries at the end of March, peas in April, figs in June, asparagus and head lettuce in December… For this, he gathers dozens of different varieties to have the best possible ones. He particularly likes the Bon Chrétien d’hiver, a pear that is sent as a gift to the king’s friends. He appreciates pears much more than apples. For the figs, he built a fig factory on the model of the nearby Orangery: the trees in crates were put in a greenhouse for the bad season.
The fruit trees are trained in fan-shaped espaliers along the walls, to take advantage of a good exposure to the sun. La Quintinie even invented models of serpette and hand saw to prune the trees and to graft (implant in the tissues of a plant called “rootstock”, a bud or a fragment of some kind called “graft”, taken from another plant or from the same plant so that this one continues to grow by forming a body with the first one).
Vegetables are grown under a bell or glass cover to capture the sunlight.
Plantations benefit from fresh fertilizer from the royal stables. The land has been drained and is supplied with water by pumping from the plain of Satory.
A valorization of the products of the earth
The King’s Kitchen Garden provides each year several tons of fruits and vegetables for the service of the Mouth (the king’s table). Contemporaries such as Charles Perrault were full of praise. La Quintinie was knighted in 1687. The king himself regularly visited the Potager and learned to prune fruit trees. He did not disdain to show it to his guests such as the doge or the ambassador of Siam. The Potager was indeed a place of horticultural experimentation in the field of early fruit and tree pruning.
The death of La Quintinie affected the sovereign who declared to his widow: “Madame, we have made a great loss that we can never repair”.
All his life, La Quintinie kept a notebook of his daily observations that he intended to publish. Death prevented him from doing so, but his son Michel published his father’s papers in 1690 under the title “Instruction pour les jardins fruitiers et potagers” dedicated to the king.
The creator and the sponsor of the Potager du roi are inseparable. Their influence is major in the fields of horticulture and gastronomy. Indeed, until then, vegetables were considered as food for the people, growing at ground level or, worse, in the earth, contrary to fruits growing in height, closer to God. This still medieval thought will be swept away by the taste of a ruler. It became fashionable to eat fruits and vegetables, to grow them and to collect them, both in France and in Europe.
From now on, asparagus and peas, so dear to the heart of the Sun King, will have a special flavor for you: that of a few hectares of land in Versailles and a genius collaboration between a sovereign and his gifted gardener. The beautiful days are here!
Discover without further delay the King’s Garden from Tuesday to Sunday from 10 am to 6 pm.
More information on http://www.potager-du-roi.fr/site/pot_visites/
See you soon on La Route des Gourmets!