Château de Brantes, Historic château and remarkable garden in Sorgues, France

Château de Brantes is a manor house with carefully designed gardens near Sorgues, featuring three mirror pools arranged along a central axis. Water flows naturally through a gravity system from the nearby Sorgue River across the grounds.

The estate is first mentioned in 1565 as a "grange", a lone country house, and passed through several owners before Pierre del Bianco, marquis de Brantes and paymaster of the papal soldiers of Avignon, built the present château in the 18th century. In 1816 General Jean-Girard Lacuée de Cessac, a former Minister of War, bought it with his wife Sibylle de Brantes and enlarged it, laying out the park and planting the plane trees. In 1954 a descendant of Sibylle bought the property back after 113 years and began restoring it.

The garden was designed from 1959 by Danish landscape architect Mogens Tvede for Louis de Brantes, with three mirror pools fed by the Sorgue and statues. Italian cypresses give it verticality, and water flows from outside the wall toward the château. Since 2005 it holds the Remarkable Garden label; the pedagogical kitchen garden "La Gioventu" is ECOCERT-certified.

The garden covers 1.1 hectares and is enclosed by a stone wall; water from the Sorgue feeds the three mirror pools, flowing from outside the wall toward the château. The grounds host the "Rendez-vous au jardin" each year on the first weekend of June, with workshops and talks on gardens and soil. Groups and school classes are received at the educational kitchen garden, "La Gioventu".

The garden's Magnolia grandiflora was planted around 1780 and measures nearly 6 metres in diameter; it is among the oldest in Europe, since the first was imported from America to Paimbœuf in 1711. Its large white flowers scent the air when it blooms.