Gardens of Normandy

Day 1 – Arrive in Paris

Touch down at Charles De Gaulle Airport and prepare for a mini scavenger hunt: finding the Sheraton Paris Airport Hotel & Conference Centre. It can feel like a maze, but you can always ping the WhatsApp group for help. Once you’ve checked in, reward yourself: hot shower, downtime, whatever you need to prepare for tonight.

At 6:30PM head to the hotel restaurant where you’ll meet your tour host Chris and fellow Carexplorers for a Welcome Dinner. That’s when your garden adventure truly begins!

Accommodation: Sheraton Paris Airport Hotel & Conference Centre  (or similar)
Included: Dinner

Day 2 – Les Jardines D’Angelique, Bois des Moutiers

Get ready for your first full day in Normandy’s gardens. You’re starting at Jardins d’Angelique, a place that’s as moving as it is beautiful.

The owners Gloria and Yves Lebellegard designed this garden in memory of their daughter Angelique, and you feel it the moment you arrive. It’s intimate, alive, and utterly heartfelt. Walk around the front of the 18th-century house and you’re in informal English territory: winding grass paths, a stream, intensely layered plantings. Head to the back and suddenly everything shifts and you’re seeing strict geometry in parterres, mostly white flowers. Formal French through and through.

The garden is home to over 2,000 rose varieties and has earned “Jardin Remarquable” status (aka truly special garden). It’s an excellent introduction to the two garden styles that define Normandy: formal French precision and informal English romance. But what stays with you is the feeling that you’re walking through something deeply personal. 

Before moving on to the next garden, we’ll give you a moment to sit and reflect on what you’ve seen with a quick lunch break in the tea room (our treat!). 

Ready for something different? Hop on the bus for a good hour’s drive to the coast.

You’re heading to Bois des Moutiers, one of France’s most important Arts & Crafts estates, and the only place in the country where architect Edwin Lutyens and garden designer Gertrude Jekyll collaborated. The property quickly became legendary in design circles and was France’s first private garden to open to the public in 1970.

Its formal owner, Guillaume Mallet, invited the two British artists to create a place where “the house has been designed to look at the gardens, and the gardens have been designed to be looked at from the house.”

While the house remains private, this afternoon you’ll step straight into the gardens. You’ll get to walk through seven enclosed garden rooms, each one designed by Jekyll with its own atmosphere of color and scent. From there, follow shaded woodland paths that lead toward the sea cliffs. It’s where Himalayan rhododendrons, azaleas, magnolias, camellias, and Japanese maples are naturalized among the native trees.

Feel the ocean breeze before we head back to Rouen for a proper French dinner. 

Accommodation: Radisson Blu Hotel, Rouen Centre (or similar)
Included: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Day 3 – Château du Champ de Bataille, Le Jardin Plume

This morning you’ve signed up for a ride through the countryside, passing charming villages, lush forests and open farmland on your way to Château du Champ de Bataille. It’s a classical French garden – just about time to visit one.

Walk through its formal terraces, intricate parterres, symmetrical hedges, and ornate water features, all meticulously landscaped and maintained. The atmosphere feels theatrical, like stepping into a living painting of the French Grand Siècle. The garden reminds us of the grandeur of 17th-century French garden tradition that Versailles exemplifies. It’s elegant, refined, and… a bit overwhelming in the best way.

Grab your lunch at a village café nearby before visiting the next garden of the day. 

After all that grandeur, the next stop is a complete shift in scale and mood. You’re heading to Le Jardin Plume, arguably one of France’s finest private modern gardens.

Its owners Patrick and Sylvie Quibel designed this place themselves, and what they’ve skillfully pulled off is remarkable: French formality’s strong linear structural elements with naturalistic planting schemes of billowing perennials and swaying grasses. The effect is stunning and explains why garden lovers from all over the world visit Plume when they are in France.

Accommodation: Radisson Blu Hotel, Rouen Centre (or similar)
Included: Breakfast, Dinner

Day 4 – Calvados Distillary, Honfleur, Les Jardins D’Étretat

Today takes you off the garden path, literally. Your morning starts at a Calvados distillery, where Normandy’s been perfecting the process of turning orchard apples into brandy for centuries.

You’ll walk through the distillery, tour the Calvados-making process and see how it is patiently aged in oak barrels. Then comes the sweetest part: tasting. You’ll try the brandy itself, taking in its aroma and depth, paired with local cheeses that know exactly how to complement it.

From there, you’re heading to Honfleur, a picturesque village where the Seine River meets the English Channel. Monet painted here. So did other Impressionist masters. In fact, this place is widely considered the birthplace of Impressionism, and when you wander its narrow streets lined with half-timbered houses, art galleries, and waterfront cafés, you’ll understand why.

Lunch is at a café (on your own), and then you’ve got free time to explore. Browse the galleries, enjoy the harbor views, or just sit with a coffee and watch the world go by. 

Once you’ve had your fill of Honfleur, it’s time to head north… Yes, another drive, but the garden waiting for you is unlike anything you’ve seen so far.

We round out today at the decidedly avant-garde Les Jardins d’Etretat. Overlooking white chalk cliffs on the English Channel, the garden combines masterful topiary and sculpture. 

It’s the singular vision of Russian landscape architect Alexandre Grivko, who spent years designing for oligarchs before calling Étretat his first truly personal creation. The site has artistic roots that go back to the Impressionists. Monet himself inspired Alexandre, so it’s only fitting that today’s version stays art-driven and unapologetically modern.

You’ll turn a corner and find goofy faces sculpted into hedges staring back at you. Whimsical contemporary designs pop up where you least expect them and make you laugh out loud. It’s theatrical, irreverent, and unlike anything else you’ll see on this trip.

Accommodation: Radisson Blu Hotel, Rouen Centre (or similar)
Included: Breakfast

Day 5 – Château de Miromesnil, Les Jardins Vasterival

You’ve hit the halfway point of the trip, and while you may think you’ve seen a lot, there is still so much more to experience in Normandy. Today brings two gardens that couldn’t be more different from each other.

First, you’re heading to Château de Miromesnil, a 16th-century castle surrounded by a beech grove with over 3,000 trees. That alone would make it worth the visit, but the real treasure here, and the one we will explore closely, is the classic walled potager next to the château.

This is where the French tradition of mixing ornamentals with productive crops comes to life. Vegetables, fruit, and cottage flowers grow side by side – practical and beautiful at once. Walk through it and you’ll understand why the French have been doing this for ages.

You’ll have lunch (on us) inside the château itself, in one of those rooms that looks like it’s straight out of a gothic novel.

The afternoon brings you to Les Jardins Vasterival, the personal design laboratory of landscape architect Alexandre Thomas. On a 1½ acre plot, Thomas has created a stylish, contemporary garden infused with imaginative ideas. We’ll wander the winding paths that connect themed spaces, coming upon one surprise after another. We’ll surely notice Thomas’s passion for plants of all kinds and his love of placing antiques throughout the garden to add layers of character. It’s a garden made to inspire, and it will.

Accommodation: Radisson Blu Hotel, Rouen Centre (or similar)
Included: Breakfast, Lunch

Day 6 – Omaha Beach, Les Jardins de Castillon

This morning, you’ll experience the crisp air of the Norman Coast as we pay our respects at Omaha Beach, the site of the Allied invasion of German-occupied France during World War II. You’ll have a guided tour to understand what happened here, then time to explore the memorial on your own. It’s quiet, sobering, and worth the silence.

After, you’ll stop for lunch at a village café (on your own) before heading to the afternoon garden.

The rest of your day belongs to Les Jardins de Castillon, a garden that started as a nursery experiment and ended up reshaping French horticulture. 

The couple Colette and Hubert Sainte-Beuve created a plant nursery in the 1970s and made their first garden in 1985. Modeled on the English idea of themed garden rooms, this garden is divided by hedges. Soon after, they added another garden, designed by Parisian artist François Houtin. Over the years, Collette introduced hardy perennials to French gardeners at popular plant fairs, suggesting that they replace their typical annual bedding plants with these softer plants that return each spring. It has been said that their garden and nursery changed how the French gardened.

Accommodation:  Best Western Plus Le Moderne (or similar)
Included: Breakfast, Dinner

Day 7 – Le Mont-Saint-Michel

You’re trading gardens for Le Mont-Saint-Michel, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that rises out of the tidal flats like something from a medieval dream.

It’s your day to be a regular tourist. You’ll be sharing this experience with a lot of other people. Crowds are unavoidable. But this is the rare tourist destination that manages to feel special despite them.

Le Mont-Saint-Michel started as a Benedictine monastery in the Middle Ages and has been one of Europe’s most important pilgrimage sites for centuries. One look at its silhouette against the sky and you’ll understand why it’s considered a wonder of the Western world.

You’ll have all day here – enough to climb to the top. You can explore the medieval architecture of the abbey, wander the steep cobblestone streets lined with shops and cafés, or just enjoy the atmosphere of this rocky island fortress.

Lunch is at an eatery of your choosing (on your own), so pick your moment and take your time. You’ve earned it after that climb.

Accommodation:  Best Western Plus Le Moderne (or similar)
Included: Breakfast

Day 8 – Château de Brécy, Monet’s Garden

Your final day of garden visits begins at Château de Brécy. The refined formal gardens were made in the second half of the 17th century and are one of the few in France that have remained unchanged. After the 18th century, some parts of the garden were abandoned until 1958, when Jacques de Lacretelle and his wife began restoration, which the current owners, Didier and Barbara Wirth, continued. 

What you’ll see are green, white, and blue gardens laid out in four ascending terraces at the back of the château, anchored by a central path and accented with topiary and carved decorative stone elements.It’s elegant, measured, and a perfect example of classical French garden design.

And then, the cherry on top of your Normandy garden tour: Monet’s Garden at Giverny.

You know this place even if you’ve never been here. The color, the light, the water—it’s all exactly as familiar and as surprising as you’d hope. The garden has two parts: the flower garden around the house, bursting with blooms, and across the street, the Water Lily Garden with its famous Japanese bridge.

Monet painted many of his most revered works here, but he once said, “My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.” Walk through it and you’ll understand what he meant. Make sure you leave enough time to explore the house, which is open for a self-guided tour. It’s your last garden of the trip, so take it all in.

Accommodation: Sheraton Paris Airport Hotel & Conference Centre (or similar)
Included: Breakfast, Dinner

Day 9 – À bientôt

This is where we say goodbye.Some of you will head home today. Others might linger in Paris or continue the adventure elsewhere. Either way, we’ll see you at breakfast before you go. 

Thanks for spending the week in Normandy’s gardens with us. Safe travels! 

Included: Breakfast