This is a love story.
It’s the tale of a couple who fell in love with an abandoned chateau. They bought it and have spent the last two decades lovingly restoring it and creating the most magical gardens.
Normally these stories are about expats who can't resist an abandoned chateau, but this one is not. French couple Patricia and Eric Laigneau first saw the chateau in 1996. It had been dreadfully neglected and was in urgent need of tender loving care and a lot of work. It was a chateau with an illustrious history, a place where the horses of the French kings were once bred, but its glory days had long since passed.
When they bought the chateau, former art historian Patricia went back to school and studied gardening in Versailles. She does nothing by halves and threw herself into turning the gardens into something magical and today, those gardens have gained fame for being absolutely gorgeous and like a living fairy tale.
Patricia admits that the chateau is her passion, “I start at six o’clock in the morning” she says “and often don’t finish before midnight”. Rarely for a garden of this size, the changes in planting are seasonal and constant.