Promenade avec Alain Baraton à Trianon // Walk with Alain Baraton in the Trianon gardens

🇫🇷 Dans cette vidéo inédite, partez en promenade au cœur du domaine de Trianon en compagnie d’Alain Baraton, jardinier en chef du parc de Versailles. Avec passion et générosité, il revient sur son parcours exceptionnel au sein de l’établissement public du château de Versailles, qu’il a rejoint il y a plus de quarante ans.

Arbres majestueux, biodiversité fragile, atmosphère unique du Petit et du Grand Trianon… À travers ses mots, Alain Baraton nous transmet son amour profond pour la nature et les jardins. Il évoque aussi l’âme singulière de ce lieu à part, havre de paix loin du faste du Grand Château, où l’on cultive l’intimité, le silence et le vivant.

Une balade sensible et inspirante, entre mémoire et émotion végétale.

🌍 In this exclusive video, take a walk through the heart of the Trianon estate with Alain Baraton, head gardener of the Palace of Versailles. With passion and sincerity, he shares the story of his remarkable journey within the Versailles public institution, which he joined over forty years ago.

Majestic trees, delicate biodiversity, and the unique spirit of the Petit and Grand Trianon… Through his words, Alain Baraton expresses his deep love for nature and gardens. He also reflects on the singular soul of this special place a peaceful haven, far from the grandeur of the main Château, where intimacy, stillness, and life itself are cultivated.

🎥 A touching and inspiring walk, filled with memory and the poetry of plants.

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I’m Alain Baraton,
head gardener at Trianon and the great park of Versailles, and I
was born on September 10, 1957, in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, into a large family. I was the 5th in a family of 7 children, and I wasn’t at all destined
for the gardening profession. My dream was to be a photographer,
and I planned to travel the world with a camera. But life decided otherwise. I didn’t do very well
at school, admittedly, and my parents enrolled me
in a horticultural school. I spent 3 years in the small
commune of Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre, also in the Yvelines. I’m truly a child of the region. I left there with a BEP
(vocational training certificate) and returned to Versailles, in July 1976 to work as an entrance fee collector,
a cashier, in the Versailles park. I charged the cars
that wanted to enter the gardens. I discovered
an extraordinary park, with fabulous trees. Trees are my passion,
and I’ve always wanted to be a photographer. But the attraction
of the gardens became quite strong, and the head gardener at the time, whose
name was Monsieur Chon, offered me a job in the gardens
following an internship. I was only slightly tempted,
but he also offered accommodation in the park at Versailles. So I joined Versailles
that year, and never left. Looking after an estate
like this is a bit like being a top chef. It’s not just about mixing ingredients. For a dish to be good,
you have to know where the produce comes from,
and combine the tastes to make it really beautiful
and enjoyable to eat. Versailles is a place
that you have to tame and make your own before you can really transform it. Because when I arrived at Versailles,
the lawns were mown like golf courses, the flowerbeds were planted with nothing
but the same old begonias, and cars were driving all
over the place in the gardens. A lot of changes
had to be made. Things changed. I was then appointed manager
of the Marly estate, then advisor to
the Minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon, member of the National Council
of Parks and Gardens. So I’ve never stopped working
to make my profession what it was in Louis XV’s time:
the noblest of trades. And one of my goals
is to truly restore it to its former glory. I have a job
that I often compare to that of a conductor. There’s a composer
who has written a symphony, a work of art, and the conductors may
be called André Lenôtre, Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie and Antoine Richard. These are the head gardeners who
designed this estate. And then there are the musicians,
who are the gardeners. And my role is to ensure
that the musicians can best interpret the work
created a few centuries earlier, by giving them the means
to play as well as possible. So my role is to direct the work
of beautification, conservation and passing on the gardens. The role of a gardener at Versailles
today is simple: not only to maintain, but also to pass this estate on to
future generations, which bears witness to a bygone era and to an art form. I’m one of those who believe that
gardening is an art in its own right. Versailles is a vast estate, with
850 hectares, 43km of paths,
350,000 trees and several hundred thousand flowers planted
in the flowerbeds every year. Each gardener is assigned to a sector
according to his or her talent in a specific area,
such as mowing, pruning or planting. The park is divided into sectors,
with each sector headed by a manager, then by a floral manager, Elena Segundo;
an assistant, Giovanni Delu; and myself;
who looks after this area. To maintain a garden like Trianon’s,
you have to draw inspiration from the past. There’s a word we don’t
use often enough. It’s the word that I instill
in my colleagues almost every day. It’s the “spirit” of a place. If you want to meet
Marie-Antoinette, for example, you have to be convinced that
she could almost emerge from a grove. So you have to collaborate with nature. You can’t push her around,
but you can’t let her do whatever she wants either. You also have to be able
to show a little imagination. You have to be able
to embellish the site. And then you have to be able,
from time to time, to let loose
and indulge yourself. From time to time, there are plantings
that are a little anachronistic, that will, for the space of a season,
give color, that won’t alter the site, but that will at least, for a while,
provide a little fantasy. This is a magnolia grandiflora, a
wonderful tree known for the color of its flowers. And here’s a typical example
of a tree that shows that global warming is happening. This tree could never
have lived normally in Marie-Antoinette’s time. It was grown in crates,
and for some years now we’ve been able to plant them in gardens,
because winters aren’t cold enough to affect their health. To combat global warming,
we’ve had to adopt a new policy. Global warming
not only makes it difficult for trees to withstand rising temperatures,
but also to combat insects and fungi which,
thanks to this rise in temperature, have become a real scourge. And to combat the damage
caused by this disturbance, we are diversifying the number
of species planted. We’re planting more species
to prevent the whole park from being affected by a disease. We give priority to plants
known for their resistance to a particular disease,
or to trees that consume less water than others. But it’s only a short step
from there to planting only fig trees or baobabs at Versailles. But we’re still a long way off. The wig tree. That’s its name. The tulip tree. This leaf of the tree
has a very particular shape. It’s unlike any other tree. And as a little anecdote, when
I was at school, I was told that it was the shadow portrait
of Sylvester the cartoon cat! When the storm of ’99 hit,
a tulip tree planted in honor of the Queen was felled
by the furious winds. This tree became the very symbol
of the 1999 storm. Which means it became the best-known,
most popular tree of the 2000s. And today, all over France,
they’ve been planted, perhaps as a tribute to the tree
destroyed by the storm. We’re at the Petit Trianon parterres,
in a garden designed under Louis XV. What’s special about this garden
is that we wanted to respect the method used at the time:
the potted plant. Here, all the plants are potted,
without exception, which allows us
to have a great diversity of plants. Plants that don’t normally live in the
same soil can be perfectly accommodated, since they are separated in pots. It also allows us
to put in plants that need watering while others don’t. It’s all about selection. When a plant dies,
for whatever reason, we remove the pot
and immediately replace it with another pot. In brief, this parterre blooms
12 months out of 12. It’s a modern design,
although the idea of pot cultivation dates back to Louis XIV. It is said that kings liked
to change the composition of their flowerbeds from time to time,
overnight, with a snap of their fingers. Well, today, at Versailles,
we’d be capable of changing the composition
of these flowerbeds with a snap of our fingers,
if we were asked to do so. Dahlias, for example, are making
a comeback at Versailles, because it’s a plant
I really like. Matricaria, a plant
that looks like a white daisy, was very popular
in the days of the kings. Yellow Rudbeckia,
yellow is wonderful in the garden. Then there’s sage,
spider flowers and tobacco. The beauty of a garden is, of course,
the beauty of the flower, but it’s also the diversity and the art
of composing floral bouquets. The white daisy was invented right here
by Louis XV’s gardener, Claude Richard. And then there are a host
of other highly symbolic plants, such as the lily. It’s impossible to imagine
a Versailles parterre without the royal flower, of course. For me, nature is
a refuge. Nature is what allows me to live and,
I would say, to hope. I’ve observed that in cities,
where there are gardens, it’s primarily in parks that people go
when they’re faced with difficulties. It’s in a garden
that people go to reflect on their past. So nature is much more
than a frame of greenery. It’s a state of mind. It’s a wonderful place to reflect, to breathe,
to rest, to sleep. At a time when we glorify
social networks, it’s hardly necessary to recall that the first
social network ever invented was the bench. The bench has enabled several buttocks
to sit side by side and converse since the dawn of time. Benches are wonderful. They’re Georges Brassens’
public benches. These are the benches that allow
tired people to lie down and sleep. It’s where lovers kiss. And as I speak, I see before me
a team of gardeners making a haystack. If Van Gogh
were in my shoes a century earlier, chances are he’d have got
out his easel and painted them. This is the Queen’s hamlet. A place that defies the centuries,
almost insolently. A place out of time. A place where life
is good, quite simply. At Versailles,
I took care to ensure that when you open a window,
what you see from the salon corresponds to the period. Here, for example, we’re in a place
where the trees are all ones that Marie-Antoinette might have seen. On the left, a catalpa, which is
a very old tree, or better still, the Petit Trianon’s sophora,
which is just behind me. This sophora was born under Louis XV,
and planted under Marie-Antoinette. The year was 1798, and a gardener, apparently somewhat of a revolutionary,
wanted to destroy a view that allowed a glimpse
of his village through a cereal field from the Petit Trianon
and the Queen’s bedroom. And to break this royal view,
he decided to plant this plane tree. It’s the elephant-foot plane tree. This plane tree thrives
under the Versailles sky. Today, it’s superb. The circumference
of its stump at ground level is 13m. Quite considerable. But what I like about this plant
is that it has witnessed the Revolution, the storms,
the great upheavals of Versailles, the terrible cold and the storm of 1999. It has defied time. It’s still there,
as magnificent as ever. This park is home
to some incredible life. There are 2 categories of animals:
the ones you see and the ones you don’t. The ones you want to see
and hear are the birds, fish, insects and butterflies. And then there’s all the
discreet wildlife that usually only appears in the evening
after the estate has closed. Huge rabbits, pheasants,
roe deer. It’s a wonderful sight
to see a roe deer with its young, and a few wild boars
calmly living at the end of the estate. It’s extraordinary to know
that Versailles is a kind of refuge
for hedgehogs and foxes. This park is also an important
conservatory for the animal world, especially when you consider
that we’re just 20 kilometers from Paris. Since I’ve been at Versailles,
I’ve been lucky enough to have planted more than a million trees. It’s a considerable achievement. And now, we also want
to give our work a meaning: to honor the planet in its entirety. As on the parterres
of the Grand Trianon, where we are, we too want to be associated
with the Year of the Oceans. As we all know, the oceans
are in danger. We have recreated the parterre
of the oceans, which symbolizes the beauty of the sea,
but also its fragility. Today, I’m 68 years old,
I’m leaving in 1 or 2 years, and I consider it my mission, my duty,
to pass on to future generations what I myself have learned
from my predecessors. Passing on know-how also
means remembering that a park like Versailles is fragile,
that trees are fragile beings, massive but fragile,
and that we must always maintain our respect for nature,
our love of it and our desire to always do better.