27 Beautiful French Garden Ideas to Inspire You in 2024

At his weekend home in the Touraine region, artist Thomas Boog delights in hosting charming al fresco dinner parties. In the backyard, potted olive trees and fragrant Iceberg roses adorn the garden dining table.

Fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy and landscape designer Bunny Mellon carefully curated the grounds of Le Jonchet to feel formal while having wild moments. Today, Zoë de Givenchy tends to the garden including the dahlias which often make appearance on the tables during family luncheon.

Designer Bunny Williams’s jaw-dropping garden at her Connecticut home is a statement to her vast knowledge of global landscape styles and plantings. Boxwood hedges form a network of parterres and lush perennial borders, planted with a mix of bulbs and annuals, in the sunken garden.

Preservationist Ben Lenhardt pulled inspiration from traditional French parterre gardens for the restoration of the grounds at his 18th-century South Carolina home. Variegated Asiatic jasmine knots and smaller spheres of oregano are framed by Kingsville boxwood borders and corner globes of Japanese boxwood.

The parterre garden at Le Jonchet becomes the perfect stage for lively luncheons hosted by homeware founder Zoë de Givenchy. On the table, she paired hand-painted plates and linens from her collection with family silver and clipped miniature box hedges.

Upon seeing this grand, French-style manse overlooking Greenwich Harbor, landscape designer Kathryn Herman instantly knew she wanted to marry French and American garden styles. The garden’s series of outdoor rooms feature signature elements of a French garden like tuteurs and hornbeam hedges but embrace the wild beauty of the land. Rows of linden trees define the formal rooms flanking the home on one side while establishing the start of the home’s romantic meadows on the other.

The emerald and white garden at this Victoria-era rowhouse may be in the heart of London, but its symmetrical nature and heavy-handed touches of stone speak to the signature French garden aesthetic. Landscape designer Iain MacDonald framed the terrace’s stone fountain with custom lattice gates.

Enchanted by the bountiful gardens and bordering pear orchard of Le Mas des Poiriers, designer Susan Bednar Long incorporated vivacious floral patterns throughout the home. The lavish textiles and designs mimic the thriving hornbeam hedges, lamb’s ears, and towering plane trees lining the entry allée.

While Richard Smith’s convivial country home may be located high above the English Channel, elements of French style can be seen throughout the home’s verdant grounds. A labyrinth of hornbeam hedges conceals antique treasures such as this cast-stone urn.

Brunelleschi, the playful peacock, struts across the formal, 17th-century-style gardens of Château de Pouy-sur-Vannes with hushed splashes of water from the ground’s fountains serving as his soundtrack.

Dating back to the gardens of the French Renaissance, formal parterres were often used as decorative embellishments to add interest within a green space. Landscape designer Drew Kenn planted crab apple trees, dwarf boxwood, and New Guinea impatiens in a parterre-style at this Connecticut cottage to highlight a path to the riverbank.

Tucked away on grounds of Versailles, the Trianon served as a private retreat for Louis XV to escape from the chaos of court. The King had embarked on a massive expansion of the Trianon gardens, adding pavilions, a menagerie, and botanical beds cultivated with specimens from all over the world.

On their sprawling 11-acre farm in Connecticut, Robb Nestor and Bill Reynolds relied on straight-lined geometric shapes—a hallmark of French garden design—to divide the different gardens. Boxwood hedges frame cabbage plantings contained in willow wattle fencing.

Built in the 12th century as a military fortress, Château de Pouy-sur-Vannes stands as a soaring example of the region’s architecture and history. Homeowner and designer Juan Pablo Molyneux restored many original elements of the home, including its surrounding moat and formal gardens.

The simplistic beauty of the French-inspired house on this Houston property inspired garden designer Herbert Pickworth to give the gardens a full-scale foliage revision. The 1920s French fountain and a statuesque urn draw the eye through the formal arrangement of crepe myrtles and clipped boxwood.

Referencing the garden follies and tented guard shacks of Versailles, Bill Curtis crafted a copper and steel pergola filled with French flair in this Houston garden. The round pool with the whimsical elephant fountain (Dan Ostermiller) was inspired by the landmark gardens at the Rodin museum in Paris.

Designer Piero Castellini Baldissera embraced the natural flora and foliage of the French Rivera to create a dreamy, fairytale-like setting of this sophisticated villa.

Interior designer Anthony Baratta and landscape designer Perry Guillot took design cues from the South of France to infuse this Los Angeles estate with a sense of joie de vivre. The wisteria climbing the garden arbors evokes Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny.

Outside of a charming villa on the French Riviera, agapanthus and plumbago flowers encircle the garden dining area; beyond are orange, pomegranate, lemon, and cypress trees. The cushions are in a C&C Milano fabric, perfectly suited for lingering lunches on a summer day.