HIDDEN WONDERS of PARIS
Paris is a legendary city, famous the world over for the beauty of its monuments, the riches of its museums and the creativity of its artists. It is also a city impregnated with history. Walking around Paris is like travelling through time.
Yet first impressions reflect no more than a part of the city’s reality. Behind the magnificent and universally familiar facade, an unknown Paris lies in waiting.
The opulent buildings lining the grandes avenues conceal a whole other world, an all-but-impenetrable secret universe of private gardens.
Painstakingly created over the years by their owners or designed by celebrated landscape gardeners, these enclaves of flowers and foliage make Paris a garden city like no other.
This garden in the 7th arrondissement was designed by Arabella Lennox- Boyd. The pool and urn occupy the centre of a lawn bordered with tulips
Push open the heavy carriage gate, make your way across the magnificent formal courtyard and you will be confronted by a scene from an earlier world, of a striking, spare beauty. The classical gardens of Paris never cease to amaze, with their harmonious proportions, their infinite variations on a standard design, their impassioned quest for equilibrium and cadence.
From left: Roses bloom around a rustic house in the Jardin du Ranelagh. A peaceful garden with an oval pond in an 18th-century mansion
Alleys of lime, yew and box, clipped square or in spheres, a minimum of flowers, roses and hydrangeas, expanses of verdant lawn: these are the basic elements that the creator of a classical garden has to play with.
Classical gardens are most often to be found on the Rive Gauche, or Left Bank, in the former Faubourg Saint- Germain, where in the 17th and 18th centuries the most elegant private town houses were built. Some are grand and imposing, others are quite the opposite, with the delightfully contrived simplicity of an Enlightenment folly. Yet others, of smaller dimensions, exhibit the jewellike charm of the miniature.
In the 7th arrondissement, this garden was once land occupied by craft workshops
What all have in common is the highly planned and meticulous appearance that is the mark of the traditional French garden.
However, Parisian gardens are not all in the classical mould, and many other styles of garden feature in the capital’s private domain. Rooted in the passions and enthusiasms of their owners, who consciously or unconsciously have attempted to create them in their own image, the gardens are notable for their imagination, diversity and originality, while reflecting the spirit of the quartier they inhabit.
A place to dine in a shady kitchen garden
Private Gardens Of Paris, by Alexandra D’Arnoux and Bruno de Laubadère, is published by Flammarion, priced £19.95.
Yet first impressions reflect no more than a part of the city’s reality. Behind the magnificent and universally familiar facade, an unknown Paris lies in waiting.
The opulent buildings lining the grandes avenues conceal a whole other world, an all-but-impenetrable secret universe of private gardens.
Painstakingly created over the years by their owners or designed by celebrated landscape gardeners, these enclaves of flowers and foliage make Paris a garden city like no other.
This garden in the 7th arrondissement was designed by Arabella Lennox- Boyd. The pool and urn occupy the centre of a lawn bordered with tulipsPush open the heavy carriage gate, make your way across the magnificent formal courtyard and you will be confronted by a scene from an earlier world, of a striking, spare beauty. The classical gardens of Paris never cease to amaze, with their harmonious proportions, their infinite variations on a standard design, their impassioned quest for equilibrium and cadence.
From left: Roses bloom around a rustic house in the Jardin du Ranelagh. A peaceful garden with an oval pond in an 18th-century mansionAlleys of lime, yew and box, clipped square or in spheres, a minimum of flowers, roses and hydrangeas, expanses of verdant lawn: these are the basic elements that the creator of a classical garden has to play with.
Classical gardens are most often to be found on the Rive Gauche, or Left Bank, in the former Faubourg Saint- Germain, where in the 17th and 18th centuries the most elegant private town houses were built. Some are grand and imposing, others are quite the opposite, with the delightfully contrived simplicity of an Enlightenment folly. Yet others, of smaller dimensions, exhibit the jewellike charm of the miniature.
In the 7th arrondissement, this garden was once land occupied by craft workshops What all have in common is the highly planned and meticulous appearance that is the mark of the traditional French garden.
However, Parisian gardens are not all in the classical mould, and many other styles of garden feature in the capital’s private domain. Rooted in the passions and enthusiasms of their owners, who consciously or unconsciously have attempted to create them in their own image, the gardens are notable for their imagination, diversity and originality, while reflecting the spirit of the quartier they inhabit.
A place to dine in a shady kitchen gardenPrivate Gardens Of Paris, by Alexandra D’Arnoux and Bruno de Laubadère, is published by Flammarion, priced £19.95.