The Story of the Gardens

Originally, Thoiry's gardens were created as a setting for the solar monument of Raoul Moreau, the castle's owner. From this period subsists an engraving showing the gardens in their initial 16th century form. Another watercolour in Thoiry's rich archives, dated 1707, was executed by the surveyor Aubry to facilitate the calculation of feudal taxes. From 1708 onwards, Desgot created a new harmony in Thoiry's gardens, inspired by Le Nôtre, the gardener of Louis XIV, and Thoiry's esoteric architecture. He imposed a strict geometrical discipline to the terraces, the linden alleys and the great lawns extending the axis and the proportions of the castle to the horizons. This symmetry and its geometrical forms  personified the formal gardens which organize Nature to magnify Man. The classicist vision of Man as the master and possessor of Nature gave way in the 19th century to a Man beset by doubt, eaten away by spleen and dreaming of far horizons. Romanticism infused minds, souls longed for exoticism, the fashion for anglo-chinese gardens was the rage. First Châtelain, then Varé, successive landscape architects of the Bois de Boulogne, transformed Thoiry according to the canons of the fashion for natural woodland and parkland gardens. New botanical species were acclimated, and the Rhododendron and Bluebell Wood was created and enriched by the plantation of new tree and shrub species among the centuries old oaks. In 1968, a historic decision transformed another part of the Thoiry estate into a modern Garden of Eden with an exotic Wildlife Reserve open to the public. For the first time in Europe, visitors could see over a thousand exotic animals free-roaming on a territory of 250 acres, herds of 21 different species living together in a natural expression of their instinctive social and tribal behavior.