page_title: Château de Menars
section_title: Gardens
hierarchical_section_title: Château de Menars / Gardens
context_page_description: The Château de Menars is a château associated with Madame de Pompadour situated on the bank of the Loire at Menars in France.
context_section_description: Jean-Jacques Cartwright, in the second half of the seventeenth century, arranged a formal garden with parterres, turf boulingrins, a canal with other bodies of water, and two planted avenues "of elms in four rows, one of six hundred toises and the others of four hundred" whence the view contains the Loire and the surrounding countryside.
  During Marigny's tenure an English garden was created in the Bois-Bas, with a small ravine located to the west, in which Marigny planted thickets of various diverse trees, sheltering cabinets of trellis-work. One of them contained a famous hydraulic machine, conceived by the mechanic Loriot. At the edge of the Loire, a Désert was arranged in an old sand pit and was decorated as an artificial grotto.
  Marigny devoted all his care to the installation of the park for the presentation of its prestigious collection of sculpture. In front of the château, in place of the former parterres, he created a broad terrace. He remade the gardens in the style of his day while commissioning many garden follies.
  At the foot of the château, the "Rotunda of Abundance", built by Soufflot, permits passage from the basement of the château to the interior of the orangery. It originally housed a statue of Abundance by Lambert-Sigisbert Adam the elder, which was replaced with a Louis XV by Nicolas Coustou, which has now been replaced by a copy of Medici Venus by Jean-Jacques Clérion.
  Towards the east, the terrace ends in a roundabout where Marigny built a kiosk in the Chinese manner designed by Charles De Wailly. Between the terrace and the road, are ordered a series of hedges, trellises, outdoor rooms of greenery as well as a kitchen garden. Below, around a small fountain, Soufflot created a magnificent nymphaeum with Serlian windows on the façade and, inside, the use of the Doric order reveals an Italianate inspiration.
caption: Marquis de Marigny by Alexandre Roslin
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