Hidden Gardens of Paris

David Brabyn for The New York Times

Parisians can dine at garden cafes like La Muscade at the Palais Royal.

NEXT to the Palais de la Découverte, just off the Champs-Élysées, is a flight-of-fancy sculpture of the 19th-century poet Alfred de Musset daydreaming about his former lovers. As art goes, the expanse of white marble is pretty mediocre, and its sculptor, Alphonse de Moncel, little-remembered. For me, however, it is a crucial marker. To its right is a path with broken stone steps that lead down into one of my favorite places in Paris, a tiny stage-set called Jardin de la Vallée Suisse.

Part of the Champs-Élysées’ gardens, this “Swiss Valley” was built from scratch in the late 19th century by the park designer Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand. It is a lovely illusion, where nothing is quite what it appears at first sight. The rocks that form the pond and waterfall are sculptured from cement; so is the “wooden” footbridge. But the space — 1.7 acres of semitamed wilderness in one of the most urban swaths of Paris — has lured me, over and over again. My only companions are the occasional dog walker and the police woman making her rounds.

On a park bench there, I am enveloped by evergreens, maples, bamboo, lilacs and ivy. There are lemon trees; a Mexican orange; a bush called a wavyleaf silktassel, with drooping flowers, that belongs in an Art Nouveau painting; and another whose leaves smell of caramel in the fall. A 100-year-old weeping beech shades a pond whose waterfall pushes away the noise of the streets above. The pond, fed by the Seine, can turn murky, but the slow-moving carp don’t seem to mind, nor does the otter that surfaces from time to time.

The Swiss Valley is one of the most unusual of Paris’s more than 400 gardens and parks, woods and squares. Much grander showcases include wooded spaces like the Bois de Vincennes on the east of the city and the Bois de Boulogne on the west, and celebrations of symmetry in the heart of Paris like the Tuileries and the Luxembourg.

But I prefer the squares and parks in quiet corners and out-of-the-way neighborhoods. Many are the legacy of former President Jacques Chirac. In the 18 years he served as mayor of Paris, he put his personal stamp on his city by painting its hidden corners green.

“He took some of the pathetic, shabby squares and gardens and transformed and adorned them,” said Claude Bureau, one of the city’s great garden historians who was chief gardener of the Jardin des Plantes for more than two decades. “He appreciated beauty — of women, of nature.”

Paris’s current mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, has taken over the task. In his seven years in the job, he has created 79 acres of what City Hall calls “new green spaces.” Just this month, he transformed the open space in front of City Hall into an “ephemeral garden,” a nearly 31,000-square-foot temporary installation of 6,000 plants and trees, and even a mini-lake.

Intimate, lightly trafficked and often quirky, the small gardens of Paris can be ideal places to rest and to read. The trick is to find them. You can consult “Paris: 100 Jardins Insolites” (“Paris: 100 Unusual Gardens”), a guide by Martine Dumond whose color photos make discovery for the non-French speaker a pleasure, or explore various Web sites like www.paris-walking-tours.com/parisgardens.html. Or you can simply wander on foot, confident that around the next corner there will be something new.

You’ll find spaces for listening to a concert or watching a puppet show (like the Parc de Bagatelle in the 16th Arrondissement); church gardens (like the one enclosing the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Seventh Arrondissement); gardens with vegetable patches (like the Jardin Catherine-Labouré in the Seventh Arrondissement); oriental gardens (like the one at Unesco headquarters in the Seventh Arrondissement that was a gift of the Japanese government). There are gardens with beehives, bird preserves, out-of-fashion roses, chessboards, playgrounds, menageries, panoramic views, even a rain forest and a farm. Green spaces adjoin cemeteries, embassies, movie theaters and hotels.

Even hospitals.

I doubt that most visitors to Notre-Dame Cathedral know that inside the nearby Hôtel-Dieu complex, which is still a working hospital, is a formal garden-courtyard with sculptured 30-year-old boxwoods. The hospital’s gardener replants much of the space every May — with fuchsias, sage, impatiens and Indian roses.

From the top of the flight of steps that cuts across the garden, you can find yourself all alone, looking out through the hospital’s windows to the tourist hordes outside. Every few months, the hospital’s interns choose a different costume for the male statue at the back — at the moment, he is Snow White.

(It was Mr. Bureau who told me that some of the most peaceful gardens belong to hospitals. Gardens help cure patients more quickly, he said).

The Square René Viviani on the Left Bank across from Notre-Dame is another spot that is easy to miss. But this tranquil square features what is said to be the oldest tree in Paris — a false acacia brought to France from Virginia in 1601, and now shored up with concrete posts. Sitting on a park bench in one corner yields one of the best views in Paris — Notre-Dame on the right and St.-Julien-le-Pauvre, a tiny church built in the same era on the left.

And then there are the gardens that are the back or front yards of museums. For instance, at the cafe-garden of the Petit-Palais— with its palm and banana trees and sculptures and mosaic floors lit from below — a half dozen marble tables and metal chairs offer the ideal setting to watch the museum’s stone walls change from buff to tawny yellow as the sun moves.

Inside the museum is a portrait of Alphand (whose park designs include the Bois de Boulogne, the Parc Monceau and the Parc Montsouris, as well as the Vallée Suisse) in a top hat, his pince-nez hanging from his black overcoat.

And then there are country settings like the garden of the Musée de la Vie Romantique, once the home of the 19th-century artist Ary Sheffer, at the end of a narrow path at 16, rue Chaptal in the Ninth Arrondissement. There, you can sit among the poppies, foxglove and roses and sip tea (a cafe opens in the summer) and pretend to be George Sand, who lived nearby, and whose personal effects have been assembled in a reconstructed drawing room inside (even a lock of her hair).

On the other side of town, behind an alley at 100, bis, rue d’Assas in the Sixth Arrondissement, is the garden of the Zadkine Museum, which was once the home and atelier of the 20th-century Russian-born sculptor Ossip Zadkine. The sculpture-filled garden is much the same today as when he worked in wood and granite under its trees. “Come and see my pleasure house, and you’ll understand how much a man’s life can be changed by a pigeon house or by a tree,” he once wrote to a friend.

But gardens are not just museum pieces; they are active, integral parts of neighborhoods. For a bit of entertainment — even drama — on a sleepy weekend afternoon, I sometimes walk over to the Square Blomet in the 15th Arrondissement. It is the headquarters of the Union Bouliste, where games of boules are played with such verve that they continue under spotlights late at night.

The ivy covering the metal walls of the field is so old that the leaves have grown up to six inches wide. At the end of a long park-bench-lined corridor sits a little-known bronze sculpture by Joan Miró, who lived in poverty down the street in the atelier of a fellow Catalan sculptor.

On spring and summer Sundays, there is even more excitement at the Jardin Tino Rossi, a sliver along the Seine that turns into an impromptu dance-a-thon. For more than two decades, the informal group of singers and dancers that has been a fixture at the Rue Mouffetard outdoor Sunday market moves to Tino Rossi, along the Quai St.-Bernard, to party. After a wine-filled picnic, they take over one of the amphitheaters, and to the music of accordion, violin and saxophone, they sing and dance the musette until midnight. The star couple one recent Sunday was an older man, in a white shirt and shoes and Champagne-colored trousers, and his partner, a redhead in white ruffles and red sequined slippers.

For quiet magic, Paris insiders pass the time on the lawn and benches of the Square du Vert-Galant, a pointy-shaped spit of land that reminds me of the deck of a cruise ship. The westernmost tip of the Île de la Cité, it offers the Louvre on the right, the dome of the Institut de France on the left, the river on both sides and straight ahead.

The best way to access it is down two flights of stairs at the equestrian statue of Henri IV on the Pont Neuf. It was there, in the 1991 film “Les Amants du Pont Neuf” (released in the United States as “The Lovers on the Bridge”) that Juliette Binoche, as a homeless artist who is going blind, struggles to paint her companion’s portrait.

Even the city’s large, formal gardens proclaim hidden spaces. The vast Luxembourg Garden can overwhelm with too many joggers, sunbathers, musicians, newspaper readers, pony riders and tulip admirers. But find the 17th-century Fountain of the Medicis, named after Marie de Medicis (Louis XIV’s grandmother), an oasis of calm and shade inspired by the city of Florence and built on her instructions.

I am not much of a gardener, and the Jardin des Plantes in the Fifth Arrondissement, with its greenhouses and odd species and identifying labels, seemed too much like work. Until I met Mr. Bureau. He told me how his mother was a concierge in the neighborhood, and that he took his first baby steps in the vast garden. It was there, in fact, that he met his wife. She was a 17-year-old high school student, he a 21-year-old gardener fresh from military service. It was raining, and he offered her shelter in the gardener’s hut.

“Women always love gardeners,” he said. “We speak of roses and perfume. We can easily get their attention.”

He was readily persuaded to show off its secret corners, the gardens within the garden. After pointing out a Lebanese cedar planted in 1734, he took me up a spiraling stone walkway to a pergola of iron, copper, bronze, lead and even gold that is France’s oldest metal decorative construction.

Then we entered a concrete tunnel beneath the main garden that led to the Jardin Alpin, a craggy, flowering space that houses species from mountainous areas around the world. Deep inside is a valley with a stream and a leafy canopy that only the strongest beams of light can penetrate. "Here,” Mr. Bureau said, “is where lovers come to hide.”

EARLY on a recent morning, I went walking around the 18th Arrondissement with François Jousse, City Hall’s main lighting engineer (and a self-appointed expert on Paris), to explore more of the city’s little-known gardens, ones I had never come across in the six years I have lived in Paris. There, as in other parts of the city, squares and parks were built in a wave of democratization in the 19th century.

Mr. Jousse showed me the Square Carpeaux, where working-class families bring their kids and where table tennis is played on permanent tables. A white statue of a woman whose arm was broken off looks over the space; a pergola sits in the center of the square.

“I love this place for what it represents: an old, authentic Paris neighborhood meeting place,” Mr. Jousse said. “I call it the anti-Luxembourg.”

We stopped by the Parc de la Turlure, a series of discreet spaces that form a sort of garden-apartment — a living room of grass, a corridor with a tilleul (linden) arcade, a “bedroom” that seems to belong to oiled women in bikinis and another for boules-playing. Abutting the Sacré-Coeur Basilica, the park has a small amphitheater that faces a wall of rushing water.

From there, we headed to the wilderness of the Jardin Sauvage St.-Vincent, a 16,000-square-foot space that since 1985 has been designated by the city as a “wild” garden, where insecticides and artificial watering are banned, and some of the most unexpected vegetation in Paris — artemisias, white nettles, wild blackberries — can be found. Unfortunately, it is open only six hours on Saturdays from April through October. Sometimes not even then. It was closed that day.

But that disappointment led to another discovery: a tree- and bird-filled garden at the Musée de Montmartre just around the block at 12, rue Cortot, where Renoir painted “The Garden in the Rue Cortot, Montmartre,” an 1876 work that now hangs in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art. The Montmartre museum itself is in what was once a 17th-century abbey. Its collection includes photographs, posters, paintings and manuscripts documenting Montmartre’s 2,000-year history.

One room, called “Party Time,” is devoted to the laissez-faire mentality of the neighborhood when it was not part of Paris proper. “Outside the walls of the city, wine is cheaper and women are less shy,” reads an information panel. From a window there, you can look down into a working vineyard no bigger than a basketball court, lovingly adorned with hostas, ferns, pansies and primrose. Purple phlox spill over a wall; wisteria drapes over a fence. (Its grapes, harvested every fall, are said to make the most expensive bad wine in the city.)

Mr. Jousse left his favorite for last: les Jardins du Ruisseau, which are not really gardens at all, at least not in the classic sense. They are a series of narrow spaces along a defunct railway track heading east out of Paris where residents have planted flowers, fruit trees, vegetables and herbs in pots.

You can look down into the space — and at its bold graffiti-painted walls. Except for special events or tours organized by City Hall, the metal door leading to a staircase down into the “gardens” is padlocked. But the 300 members of the garden association have keys.

So Mr. Jousse and I stopped by the Rez-de-Chaussée bistro at 65, rue Letort a few blocks away, and the owner, Thierry Cayla, gave us a key. Over lunch at the bistro, we joked that perhaps Mr. Cayla should turn the gardens into a tourist attraction by preparing picnic baskets for visitors.

But then, at 16.90 euros for a three-course meal, you would miss the chance for one of the best bistro bargains in Paris.

Reference :

http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/travel/29gardens.html?pagewanted=3&ref=garden