Jardin des Plantes

Garden · Jardin des Plantes quarter (5th)Paris,France

A botanical collection kept on the same Paris ground for four hundred years, its beds arranged by plant family and its avenue replanted twice yearly.

The Jardin des Plantes is a botanical collection that has been kept and studied on the same ground for four hundred years. Five long rectangular beds run 480 metres between double rows of plane trees, with a bronze statue of a naturalist at each end. Gardeners replant them twice a year, in November and in May, so there is colour from late winter into October. Away from that avenue the planting follows science rather than display: the school of botany arranges its beds by plant family, so walking them takes you through the classification in order. Louis XIII ordered a royal garden of medicinal plants here in 1626, so that doctors in training would learn which plants healed, and it opened to the public in 1640. Buffon ran it for forty-nine years and extended it towards the Seine. Lamarck argued here that species change over time; Cuvier, a professor at the same institution, rejected that idea and proved from fossil bones that whole species can vanish. The garden is still the main site of the national natural history museum, and the alpine garden shuts from November to March.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Walking in costs nothing, but every building has its own ticket — The evolution gallery, the greenhouses, the mineral gallery and the zoo each sell their own ticket, and no single day ticket covers all four.
Think of the garden as two long strips — The southern strip is the straight avenue of flower beds and galleries. The northern strip runs from a wooded mound in the west to the zoo in the east.
Look for the twenty veteran trees the museum has labelled — Four of them grow inside the alpine garden, so between November and March four of the twenty are out of reach.
Look up at the way the plane trees are pruned — Each row is trained into two flat tiers, one above the other, so the avenue looks like two green ceilings.
Cross to the mineral gallery when the evolution hall gets loud — Its rooms hold giant Brazilian crystals and meteorites from Mars, and they stay quiet even at peak times.

Things to do

1
Walk the garden's long central path from one naturalist's statue to the other
Start at Buffon's bronze statue at the gallery end, where he sits on a lion's skin, and walk east between the flower beds. At the Place Valhubert end, find the bronze panel set into Lamarck's pedestal. It shows him old and blind, with his daughter Cornélie standing over him. The line beneath reads: posterity will admire you, it will avenge you, my father.
2
Climb the old rubbish mound to a prayer carved at the top in 1870
Take the spiral path up the mound west of the greenhouses. The mound is an old refuse dump that was covered with earth in 1303. Near the bottom, erosion has stripped the soil off the roots of a plane tree planted in 1785. At the top, one of the small columns beside the kiosk carries a prayer scratched during the siege of 1870, asking God to confound the Prussians.
3
Stay on the balcony while a whole savanna day passes over the animals
Inside the evolution gallery, go up to one of the upper balconies and look down on the line of African animals, with the elephant at its head. Then stay where you are. The lighting and the sound play out one savanna day over the animals, from grey dawn through a thunderstorm to dusk, with insect noise running underneath.
4
Find the rhinoceros Buffon went to Versailles to study
Go to the top floor of the evolution gallery, into the room of historic specimens. The Indian rhinoceros standing there reached France in 1770 and lived at Versailles, where Buffon came several times to look at it. It died in 1793 and was dissected here; Cuvier published its anatomy about a decade later.