Scientific coordination

• Marie-Hélène Bénetière, mission head for parks and gardens at the department of historic monuments and heritage sites, general heritage and architecture directorate, Ministry of Culture

• Stéphanie de Courtois, garden historian, lecturer and researcher at the national architecture school of Versailles

• Julie Faure, chief heritage curator, Île-de-France region, heritage and inventory service, head of garden heritage

Call for contributions

Ambitions of this issue

This issue of the In Situ review would like to publish the results of recent research, or research that may still be under way, on the general theme of nineteenth-century parks and gardens, seen from a heritage point of view.

The corpus of parks and gardens dating from the nineteenth century is a vast one, so this issue of the review will limit itself to public gardens and their creation, or gardens that have become public through their frequentation. The aim is to provide an operational analytical perspective so that these gardens can continue to be places of sociability for people, today and tomorrow.

Presentation of the subject

More than forty years after the 1982 Florence Charter on Historic Gardens, and in a context of crises that today affect the climate, the environment and society, the heritage of gardens is the object of growing public enthusiasm. Public parks, city squares, former royal estates, artists’ gardens and outdoor places for leisure activities all play a multitude of roles in the construction of our towns and our rural territories.

When it comes to gardens, France is often identified, too narrowly, with the ‘jardin à la française’, the formal garden for which André Le Nôtre (1613-1706) was the best-known designer. The reputation of the gardens he created or inspired sometimes leads us to neglect the incredible wealth of other forms and usages of gardens created during the nineteenth century. These were the work of designers who are now recognised in their own right, whose creation were celebrated abroad but also in towns and countryside locations throughout France. These gardens were rich with precious and exotic plants and with sinuous alleys; they were decorated with care, showing off successive forms of modernity and the country’s exchanges with a wider world. Today these places still feature in the web of urban tissue, at the heart of the city or at its edges where old private estates have been taken over, their parks opened up to the public, although this has sometimes meant simplifications and amputations.

This issue of the review would like to focus attention on this field of heritage now in daily use, to make it more visible by underlining the excellence and the refinement at work when these gardens were first created, their intrinsic spatial qualities that mean that they still have an important role to play in towns and country alike. The aim is to provide an overview of the research being undertaken today on the public gardens of the nineteenth century, up to the cut-off date of 1914, and, subsequently, on the ways these places have been rehabilitated and reused during the twentieth century. It will examine the threats they face today and help suggest ways for their proper recognition and appreciation as heritage.

Themes proposed

Axis n°1 – Trades, skills and innovations; the making and representation of nineteenth-century gardens

In order to understand the innovatory aspects of nineteenth-century gardens, it is useful to look at the different trades and crafts that could be involved, landscape designers and gardeners, nurserymen, horticulturists, bedding experts, rocaille designers, founders, draughtsmen… to mention only a few. The presence of women here was particularly notable as designers, gardeners or commissioning clients. Our understanding can also be developed by looking at the new processes and operative modes that emerged to underpin this proliferation, involving practices on building sites, industrial patents or the new ways the commissioners of gardens approached their creation. These gardens can be seen as a mirror held up to some of the social issues at stake. They offer settings for new relations to the body, for example, with the creation of areas specially set aside for sporting activities. Early swimming pools were created in private or public landscaped parks, some of the first golf courses too, as well as areas intended for games and physical exercise.

Gardens also begin to feature in the architectural designs for factories, for workers’ housing estates, for the headquarters of major firms or administrative centres such as town halls and prefectures. The aim was to reintroduce nature wherever possible with a view to conditions of hygiene, but also looking at the quality of life in terms that, if they are not yet environmental already announce our present-day environmental preoccupations.

Such gardens and parks are well represented in literary descriptions, in painting, photography or in coloured drawings presented for example at world fairs. These representations help draw attention to the parks and gardens and to underline their contribution to new urban lifestyles. Such documents are precious sources of information today, although often fragile ones.

If the archives are not always well preserved, garden furniture such as benches and signage, kiosks and grottoes, grills and fountains and other features such as boulodromes or playing fields are often present. They are not necessarily well protected however, nor integrated into a holistic understanding of a garden itinerary or garden experience in the way that was originally intended, offering relief to populations suffering from the forced march of industrialisation.

Axis n° 2 From gardens for the elite to gardens for all; international influences and the French landscape model

These gardens were rapidly appropriated, then commented on and exhibited, giving rise to written and picture representations which seemed to project an idea of a triumphant French model, an impression of stereotypes that could be reproduced anywhere. Proposals for papers here might illustrate the way the French model was adapted by professionals in different political and geographical contexts. The influence abroad of the French landscape school during the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries was to be seen in several notable realisations and, in particular, in the work of landscape designers trained at Versailles.

In France, for example, the Buttes-Chaumont park in Paris, designed in 1867 by Jean-Charles-Adolphe Armand and Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps, has become an international model of the Haussmann-type of public garden. Édouard André (1840-1890), a teacher at the Versailles national horticultural school, was another incarnation of French influence and parks he designed are still in existence not only in several French towns but also in other parts of the world from Lithuania to Uruguay: the Užutrakis park in Lithuania, Sefton Park in Liverpool, the park of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg or the park of Montevideo in Uruguay. His student Henri Martinet also spread the French style of garden landscaping, from Bulgaria – Euxinograd park at Varna – to Japan – Shinjuku Gyoen park in Tokyo (1902-1906) – not forgetting Turkey and Tunisia.

French landscape and garden designers adapted their ideas to local contexts by integrating indigenous plants in their compositions and by taking into account different climates – tropical or Mediterranean – whist respecting local cultural traditions in the way space was laid out. This ability to adapt helped contribute to the successful international diffusion of the French model, whilst enriching it and making it evolve through contact with other cultures.

The influence of the French landscaped garden school spread far beyond French national borders and contributed to the design of public parks in numerous countries, bequeathing a lasting worldwide heritage of the art of garden design. This heritage deserves better analysis.

Axis n° 3 Horticultural and architectural compositions worth keeping; the challenges of the twenty-first century.

This axis is an invitation to analyse and question the unprecedented development of this type of heritage during the nineteenth century, implying the examination of its contours and limits. The period under study is one of innumerable novelties from all points of view, conceptual, formal and aesthetic. The urban model identified with Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris, where the ambition was to open up parks and gardens which were hitherto reserved for the privileged few, led to the creation of new places: rose gardens, squares, parkland cemeteries, etc. This renewal of forms coincided with the first list, published in 1840 by the newly-formed Historic Monuments Commission, that drew attention to the need to protect the parks and gardens formerly belonging to chateaux and aristocratic estates. This new awareness resulted in the preservation and recreation of numerous historic parks such as Bagatelle (Paris), Breteuil (Yvelines), Dampierre (Charente-Maritime), Chaumont (Loir-et-Cher), Le Lude (Sarthe)… which all bear the mark of the leading architects and landscape designers of the period.

Today, the diversity of such places is not easy to apprehend. In-depth understanding of their history, of their evolution over time, of what gives them a special identity, is often lacking, making their proper preservation problematic when it comes to programmes of renovation. Inventory work is underway in order to identify and survey these parks and gardens, but the task is a formidable one considering the number of places to be studied and the paucity of the means allotted to this mission. The situation is rendered worse by the disappearance of university professors of botany, by the difficulties in renewing the profession of gardener and the shortcomings in the training of heritage professionals – architects, curators – where the issues of the architecture and the history of gardens are concerned.

Nineteenth-century gardens are today the object of contradictory attentions: how to reconcile the densification of cities and towns and to maintain these gardens with their capacities for relaxing, assembling, instructing, marvelling... Such gardens have a central role to play for city-dwellers, and their different dimensions, which are at one and the same time infrastructural, environmental and cultural, should be underlined and analysed. The aim then is to give an account of the thinking, the experiences and the operations associated with all these issues above. Questions of conservation within a context of climate change and environmental and social crisis are to be addressed.

Propositions for contributions

The papers put forward should comprise unpublished material in terms of new research, new experiences or new interpretative hypotheses. Articles which have already been published elsewhere will not be accepted. The articles proposed should be generously illustrated and may include sound or audiovisual material. They can include video interviews, or even be made up entirely of such an interview.

If you would like to make a contribution to this issue, please send your proposition before 15 June 2025. It should comprise a summary of about 1 500 characters and a short CV, to be sent to

insitu.patrimoines@culture.gouv.fr
or by post:
Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication
Direction générale des Patrimoines et de l’Architecture
Revue In Situ
182 rue Saint-Honoré
75001 Paris
à l’attention de Nathalie Meyer

Copies of your proposition are to be sent to:

Marie-Hélène Bénetière, marie-helene.benetiere@culture.gouv.fr
Stéphanie de Courtois, stephanie.de-courtois@versailles.archi.fr
Julie Faure, julie.faure@iledefrance.fr
and to the general address: insitu.jardin19e@gmail.com

Results of the propositions accepted will be communicated on 10 July 2025. The completed texts are expected for 15 October 2025. The articles should be of between 15 000 and 35 000 characters in length.

Recommendations to authors concerning the number of pages, number of illustrations, copyright questions, the insertion of notes and links, etc. may be seen on the review’s site at

https://journals.openedition.org/insitu/32424