Exploring Château Marouatte: The Garden Behind the Garden

 Exploring Château Marouatte: The Garden Behind the Garden

Part 8

I knew the swimming pool was around here somewhere.

What I did not know was that finding it would lead me into one of the loveliest and most secluded garden spaces I had discovered at Château Marouatte.

In the last part of my exploration, I had crossed the large field, wandered among the newly planted fruit trees and found the informal garden at its edge. Then I went through yet another gateway.

And everything changed again.

Photo 1

The first thing I noticed was the shade.

After the openness of the field, I stepped beneath a canopy of mature trees into what felt almost like a private garden room. Branches reached overhead, filtering the afternoon light into patches of green and gold.

Green-painted benches were scattered across the lawn, some sitting in full sun and others deliberately tucked beneath the trees. Small tables appeared here and there. There was no rigid symmetry and no grand formal axis. Instead, the space seemed designed around a much simpler idea.

Find a comfortable place. Sit down. Stay awhile.

The château’s official history describes Marouatte as a complex of two polygonal enclosures, with the château itself protected by a second enclosure and cylindrical towers.  What the historical description cannot convey is how surprisingly intimate some of the spaces inside those walls have become.

Photos 2, 3 and 4

And then, through the trees, I finally saw it.

The pool.

At first it appeared only as a flash of extraordinary turquoise between the dark evergreens.

A few more steps brought the whole scene into view: a long rectangular swimming pool surrounded by old stone paving and walls, with neat rows of contemporary lounge chairs along one side.

The contrast is wonderful.

There is nothing medieval about a swimming pool, of course. Yet somehow it doesn’t feel out of place. The stone paving and walls visually connect it to the château, while the surrounding mature trees almost completely contain it within the landscape.

A large terracotta pot holds a palm beside an ornate white metal table and chairs. An umbrella waits folded beside them. Across the water, modern black-and-white loungers line the terrace.

It is unmistakably a place for summer.

A surviving site plan of Château Marouatte actually labels this area “Swimming Pool & Sun Terrace,” confirming that I had finally found the pool I knew was somewhere on the property. 

But the pool was almost secondary to what surrounded it.

Photo 4

Running along the old stone wall beside the pool is another garden.

This one has a completely different character from the broad field I had just crossed.

Tall yellow flowers rise against the pale limestone. Other plants spill outward in a loose border, with silvery foliage, sword-shaped leaves, herbs and flowering perennials mixed together. Some of those upright sword-shaped leaves appear to be iris, which would make this border spectacular earlier in the season when they were blooming.

There also appear to be Mediterranean-style drought-tolerant plants in the border, including gray-green mounded foliage that could include lavender or related aromatic perennials. I can’t identify those reliably to species from the wider photographs, but the planting combination makes sense here: sun, limestone, stone walls and a relatively dry summer landscape.

The garden isn’t manicured into submission.

Plants lean into one another. Some have finished flowering. Others are still blooming. A garden hose is lying across the ground.

It looks used and cared for rather than staged.

Photos 5 and 6

Then I turned around.

There was the château again.

A massive cylindrical stone tower rises directly beside the garden. Diamond-paned windows punctuate its walls, while ivy has begun working its way upward from the base.

At the foot of the tower is a small rock-edged garden filled with more of those sword-shaped iris leaves and low gray-green plants.

And beneath one of the newly supported trees sits something I certainly wasn’t expecting.

A small Buddha.

That one detail completely changes the mood of the space.

Medieval French stonework. A cylindrical château tower. A Buddha beneath a young tree. Iris and herbs growing among rocks.

Marouatte continues to refuse to belong entirely to any one century.

The official history helps explain some of that architectural layering. The château was partly dismantled during the French Revolution and used as a source of building stone. It was restored in the late nineteenth century by architect Dannery, who also introduced some architectural creations of his own. 

The château we are walking through today is therefore not a place frozen at a single moment in history. It has been damaged, rebuilt, adapted and lived in.

The garden seems to follow the same philosophy.

Photos 7 and 8

Walking around the lawn brought me to perhaps my favorite part of this little enclosure.

At its center is a circular stone basin or pond.

It is low enough that it almost disappears into the grass until you approach it. Aquatic plants grow from the water, and terracotta pots filled with greenery have been positioned around its perimeter.

Surrounding all of this is an extraordinary backdrop of towering evergreens.

Some have been allowed to grow into tall, narrow columns, forming what looks almost like a living wall. The effect is architectural. Instead of another stone enclosure, the garden has walls made of foliage.

And everywhere there are benches.

One faces the pond.

Another faces the château.

Others disappear beneath the trees.

It occurred to me that this garden isn’t really asking you to walk through it.

It is asking you to stop.

Photo 9

One of the benches had a small, weathered table beside it.

Even this deserved a photograph.

The wooden top is sun-bleached and worn, supported by an ornate metal base. Beside it are small solar garden lights, the sort of ordinary contemporary objects that remind me that despite all the towers and battlements, this is still a place where people actually live, sit outside and enjoy the garden.

I like finding those details.

They make the château less of a monument and more of a home.

Photo 10

And finally I stepped back far enough to understand how all these spaces connect.

The circular stone pond sits in the foreground, surrounded by terracotta pots and lawn. Behind it rises one of Marouatte’s enormous cylindrical towers. To one side is the little rock garden. Beyond the trees is the field I had just crossed.

The official description of Marouatte tells us that its inner enclosure was historically organized around towers, a keep, chapel, residence, well and vaulted galleries.  Centuries later, those formidable defensive forms now overlook lawns, gardens, benches and a swimming pool.

That may be what I liked most about this part of the grounds.

The architecture says fortress.

The garden says rest.

I had come through the gate looking for the swimming pool.

I found it.

But once again at Marouatte, the thing I was looking for turned out to be much less interesting than everything I discovered on the way.