Désert de Retz
Désert de Retz is a French landscape garden created on the edge of a forest estate in Northern France in the 18th century by François Racine de Monville. The garden has 20 separate buildings and structures spread throughout, ranging from small stone ruins and shrines to a six story tower, though only 10 of these are still standing today.
The garden is a collection of follies, set in a beautiful landscape - two of my favourite things. With hinted connections to Free Masonry, it is as mysterious now as it was when it was built, with no clear purpose evident but alluded to.
The grand, ruined building pictured above is the aptly named "colonne brisée", meaning ruined column is the largest of the structures. The most interesting fact about the building is that it is an artificial ruin. The scarring around the side and jagged formation at the top is not the result of damage over time, but was originally built to look that way. This has been designed with the intention of making the column look ancient. I really enjoy the intention of artificially creating structures which the client liked the most, even
when they would usually take decades to be created authentically through weathering.
Désert de Retz is one of the last Folly Gardens surviving in a condition reasonably close to its original design in France, namely because the better maintained sites like it were levelled or partially demolished during the French revolution. Ironically, the Désert de Retz, designed to imitate ruins, slid into disrepair and managed to avoid destruction as a result.
