Bordeaux and Palmiers

Paris has over 400 parks and gardens all over the city. Embarrassingly, I have visited probably fewer than ten of them. Even more embarrassingly, until a few days ago, I hadn’t visited the park closest to my new home: the Jardin des Plantes.

The Jardin des Plantes, in English, the garden of plants, is the main botanical garden here in Paris. It’s also home to a small zoo, a botanical school and four galleries of the national museum of natural history: the gallery of evolution, the mineralogy museum, the paleantology museum and the entomology museum.

On my first visit, I decided against visiting these museums and instead strolled through one section of the park, getting a feel for it. Like the Jardin de Luxembourg and the Champ de Mars, the Jardin des Plantes has an attractive symmetry about it. An aisle of flowers decorates the center of the park, while benches and trees line aisles that run on either side.

On a sunny day, like the day I visited, people are there reading or picnicking. I didn’t see a lot of children there. As a park, it actually seems to be a bit child unfriendly. Although I know that there were more child-friendly areas, at least in the section where I was, there was no playground or even a field for kids to run around in.

The flowers had a “look, don’t touch” appeal to them and reminded me of the “living room” that so many Upper East Side New Yorkers have as a display case for their nice furniture and antiques. You’re not supposed to “live” in these rooms at all.

For someone like me, though, the Jardin des Plantes is a pretty place to stroll and people-watch, and on a sunny day, it’s a gorgeous place to sit with a picnic and look at the flowers.

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