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Parks & gardens

Environmental visions
  •  France's most famous landscaping tradition comes from its kings...

 

•Theme-tour

Château landscaping that Versailles inspired (Croissy, one of many châteaux that circled Paris)

Because landscaping and architecture often connect, our specialist for the great parks (Renaissance water garden, Vaux-le-Vicomte, Versailles) is a former professor of the history of architecture.

 

 
  • ... but another other stems from a cemetery, le "Père Lachaise" (1804)

 

•Cemetery visit

•A continuation that contrasts

The cemetery is most poetic in early November, when nature evokes death serenely and All Saints' Day flowers adorn the tombs.

Heloïse and Abelard, Piaf, Balzac, Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison... are among the innumerable celebrities who rest in a place where slopes and nature evoke meditation rather than sadness. We help visitors find the graves that interest them (the great number of tombs makes many hard to locate, even with a map).

 

 

As well, we tell about the last combat between Paris Commune fighters and government soldiers (in 1871), traces of which remain, climb to the site of a novel's famous last sentence and show sculptures whose imagination, tenderness and, sometimes, megalomania place in the forefront of funerary art.
  • Some gardens are almost secret...

 

 

Montmartre
On château grounds, an hour from Paris

 

 

We climb these stairs behind a station snackbar...
to come upon a park that hides over the tracks.

     

     

    • ... others, like Giverny, are famous  

     

     

    Monet, "Bridge and waterlily pond"

     

     

    • Horticulture reveals both science and luxury ...

     

     

    Orchids of new varieties

    One of the planet's three great orchid farms permits visiting greenhouses where row upon row of different bloom show its experimentation. The owner herself...

     

    is our guide, explaining how the hybrids have been developed and must be treated. We may end with refreshments, served in the family's 19th-century salon.

    Nearby - Half an hour's drive southeast from Paris, this visit can precede excursions to Courances and Vaux-le-Vicomte.

     

     

    • ...or it projects a message by...

     

    •  ...honoring ties

     

    Part of the National Museum of Franco-Américan Cooperation in Blérancourt (near Château-Thierry in Champagne), this garden is on the site of a château that 1918's fighting destroyed. In hommage to the U.S. volunteers who so greatly helped France during and after World War 1, North American flowers replace the rubble.

     

    • ...suggesting a reconciled world

     

     

    New Year's card from the Foundation

    Banker Albert Kahn (1860-1940) devoted his fortune and his life to promoting peace.

     

    He created an environment where plants from different climates combine and Japanese, French and English gardens merge. These gardens are part of the Albert Kahn Foundation, in southwestern Paris, a few steps from the Seine.

     

    As well, he financed films that recorded life in over 50 countries, leaving an invaluable trace of vanished worlds. We may view these five-minute movies.

     

    The Albert Kahn Foundation is yet another way in which, between 1850 and 1940, Jews contributed to the cultural heritage of France.  

     

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    Château / 18th-century engraving, unsigned; statue / Courances; Giverny / Bill Dudley; Albert Kahn gardens / Albert Kahn Foundation

     

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