The King’s Vegetable Garden

The King’s kitchen garden was created by La Quintinie in 1678 on a plot of land nearby the Château de Versailles to provide fruit and vegetables for Louis XIV’s dinner table to the Sun King’s great delight. The whole garden covers nine hectares and is composed of a sequence of smaller plots, garden chambers whose walls and terraces control exposure to the sun and create microclimates to diversify production.

La Quintinie was able to cultivate and harvest figs, melons, asparagus, peaches, plums, pears and more, sometimes even out-of-season. The King’s kitchen garden is also a secluded haven, sheltered by high stone walls and foliage, conducive to daydreaming and letting time stand still. A listed national monument, it has been open to the public since 1991.

Today the ethos of the King’s kitchen garden is to protect the living world and the diversity of species. It contains roughly four hundred and fifty varieties of fruit and four hundred varieties of vegetable. It has conserved its triple function as a place of cultivation, experimentation into new techniques and training in gardening. Today it welcomes students from the national school of gardening, who are allotted plots for their own practical endeavors, as well as courses in gardening theory and practice.

The garden has been growing and teaching for more than three hundred years without interruption. Walking the alleys between the plots we sense the history of this magnificent royal garden and the people who have made it what it is over the centuries. This extensively illustrated book tells that story and brings the garden alive to readers.

The first edition dates back to 2003. This new bilingual edition takes into account recent intervening evolutions at the garden.