In the 19th and 20th centuries, it was a place where Parisians celebrated, met, strolled, and relaxed. Catherine further commissioned a landscape architect from Florence, Bernard de Carnesse , to create an Italian Renaissance garden , with fountains, a labyrinth , a grotto , and decorated with faience images of plants and animals, made by Bernard Palissy , whom Catherine had tasked to discover the secret of Chinese porcelain.
It was divided into rectangular compartments by six alleys, and the sections were planted with lawns, flower beds, and small clusters of five trees, called quinconces ; and, more practically, with kitchen gardens and vineyards.
The Tuileries garden was the largest and most beautiful garden in Paris at the time. His successor, Henry IV — , and his gardener, Claude Mollet , restored the gardens, built a covered promenade the length of the garden, and a parallel alley planted with mulberry trees where he hoped to cultivate silkworms and start a silk industry in France.
He also built a rectangular ornamental lake of 65 metres by 45 metres with a fountain supplied with water by the new pump called La Samaritaine , which had been built in on the Pont Neuf. Though Henry IV never lived in the Tuilieries Palace, which was continually under reconstruction, he did use the gardens for relaxation and exercise. It became his enormous playground — he used it for hunting, and he kept a menagerie of animals.
When the king and court were absent from Paris, the gardens were turned into a pleasure spot for the nobility. In a former rabbit warren and kennel at the west rampart of the garden were made into a flower-lined promenade and cabaret.
