Pré-Catelan Garden

The Pré-Catelan garden features a massive, solitary copper beech tree planted in eighteen seventy-five, its dark, weeping branches spreading wide over the central lawn. King Francis the First once hunted here, though the name actually honors a troubadour named Catalan who was murdered in the woods. By the late nineteenth century, the city turned this former royal hunting ground into an English-style landscape garden, complete with hidden rockeries, winding gravel paths, and a collection of exotic trees from across the globe.