Luxembourg Gardens

Garden · Saint-Germain (6th)Paris,France

The Left Bank's great public garden in Paris, formal parterres and loose lawns around an octagonal pond, laid out for a homesick Florentine queen.

Luxembourg Gardens is the Left Bank's great public garden, and Paris at its most unhurried. You drag a loose green metal chair to wherever the light falls best — that small freedom is half the pleasure. Children steer wooden sailboats across the octagonal pond with a stick, pensioners bend over chessboards, and runners loop the gravel. A ring of white marble queens watches over the water, and in one shaded corner a baroque grotto fountain looms above two stone lovers. The garden is of two minds: rigid French geometry around a sunken parterre, looser English lawns at the edges. It began as an act of homesickness. Marie de' Medici, widow of Henri IV, missed Florence and commissioned a palace and grounds echoing the Pitti Palace and Boboli Gardens of her childhood. The palace now houses the French Senate, which still owns and tends the estate. Bees work a corner apiary and gardeners graft heritage apples nearby. Hemingway crossed these paths hungry; Marius first glimpsed Cosette here. It remains a working garden, formal in its bones and endlessly, easily used.

Worth knowing

Good to know

There are two kinds of green chair, and locals grab one kind first — Beside the upright bistro seats sit lower reclining loungers — the prize on a warm afternoon, so they vanish fastest from the pond rim.
Most of the grass is for looking — Nearly every lawn is roped off to protect it; only a stretch near the southern end is open for sprawling, so read the little signs.
The flowerbeds are a different show each season — The Senate's gardeners replant the parterre below the terrace, spring bulbs giving way to summer bedding, so it never looks the same twice.
The carousel still runs a game that has vanished elsewhere — children spear its hanging brass rings with a wooden baton — a ring-catch game that has all but vanished from the world's merry-go-rounds.

Things to do

1
Launch a boat on the pond
Rent a wooden sailboat at the octagonal pond and push it off with the long stick. Then stand at the stone rim and watch the little fleet drift, stall, and collide, getting rescued again and again by children who lean far out over the water to nudge a stranded hull back toward home.
2
Escape to the Medici Fountain
Leave the bright central axis and follow the eastern side into shade until you reach the long, dark basin of the Medici Fountain. Sit on the stone ledge, look up at the giant frozen above the two lovers, and stay a while for the coolness the plane trees hold overhead.
3
Claim a chair and do nothing
Drag a loose green chair to a sunny gap in the parterre and angle it toward the palace. Then simply sit. Let the chess games, the joggers, and the shifting light across the marble queens go by. This unhurried, self-arranged sitting is the garden's truest local ritual.
4
Walk the orchard corner
Head to the quieter southwest to find rows of trained, espaliered apple and pear trees and the old beehives beyond them. In spring look for blossom against the bare framework; later in the year the branches hang with fruit the gardeners still prune and pick by hand.