The Ménagerie du Jardins des Plantes, Paris, once was a dreadful place, with small cages, rusty wire all over and a terrarium that smelt like an open sewer. I visited it several times during the seventies because it was conveniently placed, close to the Gare d’Austerlitz and to the Jardin des Plantes with its museums [...]
At the initiative of Napoleon III, working with Baron Haussmann, the Parc Montsouris, the second largest park in Paris after the Buttes Chaumont, was built on Moc Souris hill, once covered with undergrowth that the market gardeners used for fuel (mineral coal) for their hothouses, which were built in the surrounding area. The quarter in [...]
Chateau Vaux le Vicomte is located about 50km south east of Paris and is reachable by train from Paris in a couple of hours. The castle is privately owned and is maintained rather well for visits. While this castle is small compared to Versailles it is still an amazing visit and specifically a great historical [...]
Although the Parc Monceau is not very large by Paris standards, it is one of the most charming parks in Paris, and only about a half hour’s walk from the Place de l’Opera. It is a park of shady walks, of leafy bowers, of ponds, of imitation natural springs, in fact, of everything that makes [...]
The garden created in 1617 by “Boyeau de La Bareaudière”, first theorist of the French garden, on Marie de Médicis’s initiative, organized itself around a central flowerbed crowned with terraces. Two thousand elms aligned in square framed the perspective which stumbled in the South over the wall of the enclosure of the Carthusian monks. The [...]
The Bois de Vincennes is a park in the English landscape manner to the east of Paris. The park is named after the nearby town of Vincennes. The Bois de Vincennes, like the Bois de Boulogne, is often not thought to be part of Paris proper, as it consists only of unpopulated public land. However, for administrative purposes, it is [...]
The Jardin des Tuileries is one of Paris’s most visited gardens thanks to its central location between the Louvre and Place de la Concorde. As such the Tuileries are part of a grand central axis leading from the Louvre all the way to La Défense, the city’s business district. In the early 16th century the area was a [...]
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