Potager du roi, Royal kitchen garden in Versailles, France

The Potager du Roi is a nine-hectare walled kitchen garden beside the Palace of Versailles, laid out in a Grand Carré of sixteen plots around a circular basin with a single fountain. Pale gravel paths divide the beds, and a raised terrace runs along the walls. Behind the high walls, twenty-nine enclosed gardens create separate microclimates.

Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie designed the garden in 1683 for King Louis XIV, draining swampy ground to create productive farmland. After the French Revolution, the garden lost its role as a supplier to the royal court and eventually passed to an agricultural school.

The garden's name comes from its role supplying the king's table, and Louis XIV liked to walk here and even learned to prune fruit trees with his gardener. Madame de Sévigné recorded the court's obsession with its peas, discussed for four days. Since 1995 the École nationale supérieure du paysage has run the site.

The garden lies beside the Pièce d'eau des Suisses, next to the Orangerie and the Saint-Louis cathedral, and Louis XIV reached it by the Allée du Potager through the Grille du Roi, a wrought-iron gate by locksmith Louis Fordrin restored with help from the World Monuments Fund in 1993. Inside, a raised terrace rings the central basin and its fountain, giving a view over the sixteen squares of the Grand Carré.

La Quintinie was among the first gardeners in Europe to grow asparagus out of season here by using heat and covers to control growing conditions. The technique he developed in this garden was later adopted by growers across France.