100% creation takes up summer quarters in Versailles: focus on crafts. Today, gardeners. They are sixty to work in the gardens of Versailles, divided into sectors. Elena Secondo, art gardener and responsible for the parterre of the Grand Trianon, opens the gate of the estate’s park to us.
For Louis XIV, the gardens were as important as the castle. With his gardener, André Lenôtre, he created the French gardens with an impressive rendering, but also a place of distraction and enchantment. Elena Secondo has set herself the ambition of surprising visitors to the Palace of Versailles.
“ When, we walk in the Palace of Versailles, we can imagine Louis XIV, Louis XV, Marie-Antoinette, what they could see in this place. Everyone knows the Palace of Versailles and its French gardens. They were born here. I am a landscape designer and I have studied this history in books and, therefore, being here means a lot to me. ».
” I work with the team for visitors, for tourists, not just for my pleasure, my passion. Once I finished the green parterre, I had shivers, but after receiving comments from visitors, even if they are negative, it gives me something extra “.
Elena Secondo studied town planning and landscaping with a specialization in art gardening in Italy. In 2017, she arrived in Versailles and is now responsible for the gardens of the Grand Trianon. Elena Secondo likes to be in the field: creating beds, pruning groves or completely redoing a flowerbed, for this she draws up a design before setting it up on the ground. The activity of the gardeners accompanies the seasons: weeding, cutting the lawns, watering, picking up the leaves, maintaining the groves. Elena Secondo exercises her profession with a breath of imagination while respecting the history of the place.
” In 2020 and 2021, the flowerbeds of the Trianon were completely different and unique, it was unheard of. They were composed of perennials, shrubs and trees. It was a green floor and it could shock ! But it was to have a sensitivity to the eye of the nuance of the greens, which the gardeners of Versailles did at the time and which they still do today, in the English garden, they work with the different shades of foliage “, she explains.
This year’s floor, as always, is a new challenge for Elena Secondo with her team. The aim is to move visitors to the Palace of Versailles. ” This year, the high parterre is dedicated to King Louis XIV and most of the plants refer to the animals of the royal menagerie, for example a plant called lion’s tail, the symbol of power, plants that can remind the French people like the cockscomb. The lower parterre is dedicated to Napoleon who also lived in the Grand Trianon, so to the bee, with a bed in a flowery meadow and right next to it, we are going to install hives to have a small production of honey. “, informs us Elena Secondo.
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