Park Bagatelle

Park Bagatelle (Parc de Bagatelle) is an Anglo-Chinese park located in western Paris. It was constructed in 1775 by François-Joseph Bélanger and during the XIX century the design was modified by Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier, a French landscape architect, who designed most of Paris' famous parks and gardens.

The design of the park was inspired by the paintings of the impressionist Claude Monet. Thus, Forestier designed a rose garden and a number of other gardens filled with perennial and climbing plants skilfully blending flowers of the same colour and shape with other natural elements, thus incorporating impressionistic touches to the park. Today, the rose garden features some 10,000 roses of over 1,000 varieties. In the park, one can also find other gardens of different styles: a French garden, an English garden, a Japanese garden, and an iris garden. Each season you can see different plants flower in the park's gardens: spring flowers include peonies, clematis, and irises; summer flowers include roses and water lilies; dahlias, and trees with coloured foliage can be admired in autumn; while snowdrops and winter shrubs bloom in winter.

The park also houses a beautiful château and an orangery called Orangery de Bagatelle, built in 1729 by Marechale Duc d'Estrées. The orangery, constructed in just 77 days, was the product of a bet between Comte d’Artois and Marie Antoinette, who said it could not be built in less than 90 days. Since 1907, an international rose competition called "Roseraie de Bagatelle" has been hosted in the park every year from May till September, attracting rose growers from all over the world.