La Grenouillere Garden
Overview
La Grenouillère is a privately created water garden with strong Asian and Japanese inspiration at Les Essarts-le-Roi, near Rambouillet. The Comité des Parcs et Jardins de France lists Françoise Lacaze as owner and gives the garden’s address at 24 route de l’Yvette. The garden occupies a wet valley site around the sources of the Yvette, with rhododendrons, Japanese azaleas, hydrangeas, water features and Japanese-style decorative elements.
History
Françoise Lacaze and her husband bought the property in 1988, when the site was essentially a wet, marshy field crossed by the young Yvette. Early attempts to garden there were difficult because of constant water, clay soil and extreme microclimatic conditions. Houzz gives 1995 as the garden’s creation date, while Deco.fr explains that a decisive shift came in 1998, when Lacaze called on landscape designer Sonja Gauron to rethink the garden around water rather than fight against it.
From 1999, the garden was reorganised as a water garden: drainage channels, ponds, water circulation and moisture-loving planting turned the difficult site into the garden’s main identity. Lacaze later continued developing it herself after the death of her husband, gradually adding Japanese and Asian-inspired structures, lanterns, sculptures, a tea-house element and Japanese-style pruning. The garden became known through private visits, garden media and its selection in 2014 for the French television programme Le Jardin préféré des Français, representing Île-de-France.
Design features
The garden is organised around water, with ponds, streams, small cascades, bridges, stepping passages, moisture-loving planting and a strong sense of enclosed atmosphere. Its Japanese references include a tea garden area, a dry garden near the entrance, a tsukubai, a shishi-odoshi / deer-scarer fountain, lanterns, bamboo elements, pavilion-like structures and trees pruned in a Japanese manner. Lacaze herself explicitly described the garden as japonisant rather than a strict reproduction of a Japanese garden, so it should be recorded as a Japanese-inspired hybrid water garden rather than a canonical Japanese garden.
Garden elements
Buildings
Enclosures
Waters and islands
Stones
Other elements
Current status
Extant private Japanese-inspired water garden. It is open on limited days and for group visits by appointment rather than as a regular public park.