Oriane Jouno runs her finger over the palm-sized pseudo blossom of the Hong Kong dogwood. As if painted, the colour turns from cream to a pale pink. "It is one of our rare woody plants in the park," says the 35-year-old Frenchwoman, who manages the huge Parc Botanique de Haute Bretagne near Fougères with her family.
It was her plant-crazy father Alain Jouno who set up the park in the eastern part of Brittany, on France's northwest Atlantic coast in 1994. Where earlier only scrub grew, today 24 theme gardens celebrate the art of landscaping.
The Japanese garden near the manor house with its meticulously raked gravel radiates tranquillity. In the water garden, on the other hand, grasses, perennials and shrubs sway in the wind. In a pond, pyramid-shaped bamboo islets jut up from the water. Crossing over curved, bent and hanging bridges, visitors are led through the plant kingdom, past rhododendrons, camellias and azaleas to the hydrangeas which radiate blue to the extent that they almost seem artificial.
In Brittany, considered the land of the hydrangea, huge bushes even populate the roadsides.
Artfully tailored treetops
In the Jardin du Château de la Ballue, a 17th-century castle in Bazouges la Pérouse, the arrangement of yews, hornbeams and boxwoods requires the utmost precision. A gardener carefully corrects the cord plumb along the hedge before taking up his shears. Cubes and spheres in perfect form pay homage to the art of plant pruning in this castle garden.
"A garden is not an exhibition of plants," says Marie-Françoise Mathiot-Mathon, "it's the overall composition that counts."
The owner of the castle is devoted to pursuing one goal for her horticultural work of art: Beauty. And so, in this garden visitors walk as if on a well-composed theatre stage, where even the crowns of tall pines are modelled.
With its sublime parterre of geometric shapes and symmetrical paths, the complex initially appears to be a baroque garden, but it was actually created in the 1970s. Interwoven paths lead through 13 sub-gardens including a labyrinth - baroque garden pleasure reinterpreted!
Subtropical garden with a view
"Gardens are the only remaining luxury of our times," says Guirec Maréchal. A former war correspondent, he fulfilled a dream in 2021 by acquiring the garden of Le Kestellic in Plouguiel, near Brittany's pink-coloured granite coast.
Across the 7 hectares of the garden, there is an altitude difference of 80 metres. The Breton incessantly works on the thickly-overgrown park, cutting through the greenery to offer a view of the picturesque bay of the Jaudy River. "I am seeking an aesthetic balance between unbridled nature and my landscape designs," he says.
Some 1,800 plant species from five continents thrive in the hidden oasis, among them some exceptionally tall sub-tropical tree ferns. With their huge fronts they form an exotic mini-jungle. And aren't primeval forests regarded as a vanishing treasure in our world?
Designer gardens in a floral frenzy
Another person to have joined Brittany's splendid botanical scene is French shoe designer Christian Louboutin, who acquired the Jardins de Kerdalo in the Departement Côtes d'Armor in 2021.
For Louboutin, whether in fashion or in his garden, it is all about forms and colours. His private park in Tredarzec remains open to the public, and visitors can stroll through this vast realm of wonder, amid a sea of flowers that exudes the colours of an Impressionist painting.
In Kerdalo, water is flowing everywhere - down steps, in canals, through an Italian grotto and on into ponds and a lake. Beneath the gigantic leaves of the man-sized mammoth leaf (Gunnera manicata), visitors feel as if thrown back to the beginning of Time itself.
A garden all around the castle
Those who enter the sprawling Domaine de la Roche-Jagu also embark on a journey through time.
"After terrible storm damage, there was an opportunity for a young landscape architect to create a contemporary garden around the 15th-century castle, but one inspired by the Middle Ages," says park director Fabien Dumortier.
"In doing so, we are fully committed to biodiversity." You can spend hours here wandering through the various fruit and herbal gardens or strolling under the pergolas - all the way to a camellia grove with its 350 varieties.
Rarities found in a fishing town
Plant rarities from the southern hemisphere crowd the foot of a granite rock in the Jardin Exotique et Botanique de Roscoff. In this small fishing town on the northern Atlantic coast, succulents, agaves and cacti vie for attention among 3,500 subtropical plant species in a manageable and easily accessible space. "Our many sugar bushes (protea), for example, invoke a bit of South Africa in Brittany," says Jean-Michel Moullec of the civic association GRAPES, which manages the garden.
Even more exoticism envelops the visitor on Île de Batz in the Jardin Georges Delaselle, named after the botany enthusiast who, starting in 1897, created a landscape garden with exotic plants on the car-free island off the village of Roscoff. It's an oasis in the Atlantic with tall palm trees and banana trees - thanks to the Gulf Stream, which has bestowed this Breton island with a particularly mild climate.
