Castles · Tour

Private Giverny and Versailles, with the 221 Garden Sculptures

Nine private hours, two estates, and a guide who treats the gardens at Versailles as a work in their own right rather than as the space you cross on the way out. There are 221 sculptures out there, which makes the park the largest open-air museum of sculpture in the world, most of them drawn by Charles Le Brun. Louis XIV set André Le Nôtre to the job in 1661 and the work took about forty years: levelling the ground, cutting the beds, digging the ponds and the Canal. The king thought the gardens mattered as much as the building, and the plan bears that out, laid out along geometric axes with a terrace that takes in the whole thing at once. Giverny comes with Monet's house, the water garden with its Japanese bridge, wisteria, willows and irises, and the big studio where the Water Lilies were painted; those canvases now hang at the Orangerie in Paris. The pink house is where he lived with eight children, and his collection of Japanese prints is still on the walls. Monet arrived in 1883 and stayed forty years, which is what turned a quiet Norman village near Vernon into a place of pilgrimage while he was still alive. Admission is included at both, and at Versailles that holds even on Musical Fountain and Musical Garden days: the musical gardens run Tuesdays from June to October, the fountain shows Saturdays and Sundays from April to October. A licensed professional driver-guide, hotel pickup and drop-off, and headsets if the group needs them.