Les Jardin des Plantes

By the time I visited Les Jardin des Plantes, my vacation in Paris was more than half over. I woke up that morning with a sore throat and fever, signaling the onset of a cold. The garden was less than 2 miles away, so I decided to walk, but when I arrived I was already tired.

Les Jardin des Plantes is the primary botanical garden in France. But it is more than a garden. As part of the national museum of natural history, the garden's grounds contain 4 museums (evolution, minerology, paleontology and entomology), which are located in lovely ancient buildings around the perimeter. The garden also contains a small zoo, and greenhouses with plant collections from Mexico and Australia.

Arriving at the gate, the focus is a formal garden, not unlike the Tuileries and Luxembourg gardens. This symmetrical design centers on the Grande Galerie de l'evolution. Long straight paths of crushed stone cross wide expanses of lawn. There were clipped shrubs and statuary, but not as many as in the other formal gardens. Here the focus was on the plants.

The center part of the garden is devoted to flower beds, organized by plant family. When I visited, workmen were installing new spring plants, which were labeled with common and Latin names. Other beds were full of cool weather flowers from earlier in the season, such as these orange, yellow and white poppies.

In early spring, the most beautiful spot is the iris garden, twelve square beds of spring flowers surrounded by lawn. In one area of the iris garden, the edges of the beds are boxed in by tiny hedges. This looked silly to me and it was at this point that I took a dislike to formal gardens, particularly the desire to contain nature into tidy spaces.

In the photo above, the paleontology museum overlooks the iris garden. Even from the side, this building is beautiful and foliage is not allowed to obstruct its view, which is often the case in Paris.

In addition to blue, purple and yellow irises, other spring flowers were in bloom, including this blue clematis, heavy with flowers.

Next to the iris garden is a rose garden, planted around the minerology museum. There were several massive shrub roses in bloom,

but my favorites were the climbing roses on green metal trellises. These had not yet begun to bloom, but they looked lovely trained on their structures.

To encourage the public to go green, one corner of the garden featured plants and information on creating a butterfly garden.

Yet only five small patches of earth were devoted to the butterfly demonstration garden, too little space to attract many butterflies. In the photo below, the entire butterfly garden is the few low plantings in the foreground.

An interesting part of the garden was the potager, surrounded by a metal fence. A potager is a kitchen garden arranged with style, where plants are chosen for their edible and ornamental qualities.

The potager contained low beds arranged symmetrically. The round orange cottage in the potager was absolutely charming.

By the time I finished looking at the formal gardens, I was tired. I would have liked to visit the Alpine garden and the zoo, but I decided to return to the hotel and lie down.

I did not have an opportunity to return to this garden that week. I will go back to Paris one day and give this important garden the attention it deserves.

Luxembourg Garden

I visited Luxembourg Garden on a warm and sunny afternoon, the first clear day after a cold rainy week. It was Sunday and the garden was packed with people, families with children, couples holding hands, tourists with cameras, restless youth and the elderly.

The gardens are in a formal French style with broad lawns crossed by stone pathways. At one end is a palace and the gardens are organized on an axis around the palace.

The focal point of the garden is a large octagonal pool in front of the palace. Colorful sailboats float slowly by on the still water. Children crowd around the pool and push their boats with brown wood poles.

Colorful flowerbeds containing perennial and annual plantings surround the lawn. No one is allowed to sit on the lawn in this garden, and Parisians are respectful of this rule. There are hundreds of green aluminum chairs throughout the garden.

The garden is terraced with chairs on every level. Fountains, urns and statuary are abundant.

Trees are clipped into gigantic blocks of foliage.

While Luxembourg Gardens is visually formal, it is used informally. On a sunny weekend, it is almost chaotic, with thousands of people milling about, children shouting, families picnicing, friends talking.

I walked by one couple with two large dogs on lead. One of the dogs lifted his leg and marked his territory on the coat of a man sitting on a bench, engrossed in conversation with his friend. The couple tugged at the dogs leash and rushed away before he detected the wetness on his coat.

A faint breeze stirred the sound of music. In a small wood, a four piece band and a vocalist entertained the crowd with traditional French country tunes. There were few chairs for the audience, but people reserved them for the elderly.

The vocalist sang three songs in a smokey voice and then the concert ended. The musicians packed up their instruments.

Luxemboug Garden was extablished by royalty in 1611. Today it is for the people and remains one of the most popular gardens in Paris.

Tuileries

Jardin des Tuileries was the first garden visited in Paris. Within an hour of our arrival, we walked to Louvre Museum and found the Tuileries just beyond.

There were few visitors to the garden on that cold and rainy afternoon, but the gray skies seemed well suited to the stone architecture of the Louvre.

Tuileries is a formal garden with expansive stretches of lawn crisscrossed by wide paths of crushed stone. Along the paths, a variety of trees are planted, as well as formal beds of blue and purple flowers, including irises and geraniums.

There are several large pools of water, including three fountains. The largest fountain is centered in the main crushed stone corridor through the garden. In the distance is the Orsay Musee, which houses Impressionist art.

Near the oblisque of la Place de la Concorde, the largest pool reflected the gray tones of the sky. Trees are trimmed to limit their height, so the buildings and monuments can be better appreciated.

On the very last day of our stay in Paris, I returned to the Tuileries. The day was warm and sunny and I arrived at noontime on a workday.

The garden was crowded with people walking through the main crushed stone pathway through the garden.

Working people ate their lunches on the benches and lawns throughout the garden.

There is a generous supply of statuary in the Tuileries, created by important artists of the past. Even the trees and shrubs are trimmed into hedges and topiaries, making them statue-like in form and function.

The marble man above has seen too many tourists, but the woman below looks beautiful against the red blooms of a buckeye tree (Aesculus).

But despite the famous statuary, the enormous fountains and the gigantic monuments at the Tuileries, my favorite spot was a shady copse of trees,

where groups of old friends gathered in the dappled sunlight.

Joli jardin

The taxi pulled slowly up the street at 2:30 and the night was thick and black. The houses in the neighborhood were dark shapes in the mist. There were no signs of people, and one small bird sounded a lonely call.

A van was parked at the end of the driveway to discourage deer from roaming deep into my garden, but I had already heard that it had not been successful. Deer had been daily visitors to my wildlife habitat.

As the taxi driver drove down the street, I surveyed the garden. In the darkness, the plants looked thick and green. The blue salvia beside the driveway had begun to bloom, with flower spikes a foot tall. The passionvine had twined itself along the stone border and climbed up the salvia, wrapping the taller plants with pale green tenrils. The dogwoods spread themselves full and wide.

I stepped into the house and found a flashlight. In the back, the soil on the path was soft and damp. The Hosta albomarginata was tattered and torn, but my favorite, the giant 'Sum and Substance,' had only been tasted. The phlox and the asters were half gone, but the coneflowers were still perfect. The pond was still, waterplants floating beneath the surface of clear water. The buttonbush was heavy with wet foliage and blocked the path. I turned back to go inside.

We had been gone for two weeks, longer than usual. Now we were home, and the garden had never looked more beautiful.