page_title: French landscape garden
section_title: Désert de Retz, Yvelines (1774–82)
hierarchical_section_title: French landscape garden / Chronology of notable landscape gardens in France / Désert de Retz, Yvelines (1774–82)
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: La fabrique la plus célèbre du Désert de Retz à Chambourcy en France
context_page_description: The French landscape garden is a style of garden inspired by idealized romantic landscapes and the paintings of Hubert Robert, Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, European ideas about Chinese gardens, and the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The style originated in England as the English landscape garden in the early 18th century, and spread to France where, in the late 18th and early 19th century, it gradually replaced the symmetrical French formal garden.
context_section_description: The garden was created by François Racine de Monville (1734–1797), a French aristocrat, musician, architect and landscape designer. In 1774, de Monville bought a country estate  at Saint-Jacques-de-Retz, which had a farm, lands, and a formal jardin à la française.  He resolved to create a new garden in the new English style. He called the garden le Désert de Retz, and planted it with four thousand trees from the royal greenhouses, and rerouted a river and created several ponds.
  The garden, completed in 1785, contained twenty-one follies, or architectural constructions, representing different periods of history and parts of the world; they included an artificial rock, a temple of rest, a theatre, a Chinese house, a tomb, a ruined Gothic church, a ruined altar, an obelisk, a temple to the god Pan, a Siamese tent, and an ice-house in the form of a pyramid. The best-known feature was the ruined classical column, "La Colonne détruite", large enough to hold a residence inside.
caption: La Colonne détruite
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