Chateau de Versailles orange-tree planters.(Design notes)

On August 17, 1661, Louis XIV attended a fete given in his honor by France's superintendent of finance, Nicolas Fouquet, at his new estate, Vaux-le-Vicomte in Maincy. At this event, the king (who had only recently assumed total responsibility for governing his kingdom) saw the finest chateau and garden in France. Led to believe that funds had been embezzled from the state treasury to build Vaux-le-Vicomte, he responded by having Fouquet arrested and thrown into jail. He then seized the finance ministers design team--the architect Louis Le Vau, the painter-decorator Charles Le Brun, and the landscape architect Andre Le Notre--commanding them to renovate and expand his royal estate, the Chateau de Versailles.

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In addition to appropriating Fouquet's team, the king also removed from Vaux-le-Vicomte furniture, chandeliers, tapestries, and more than five hundred orange trees, which were said to be his favorite tree. Le Notre, who designed both gardens, is credited with conceiving tubs made entirely of oak to hold the orange trees so that they could be easily transported between outside and inside. During the reign of Napoleon I the design was enhanced by replacing the wood stanchions, which had a tendency to rot, with cast-iron ones.

More than three hundred years after Le Notre created the gardens at Versailles and at the request of the Etablissement Public du Musee et du Domaine National de Versailles, Le Notre's concept for an orange-tree planter was re-created using the same base ...