Australian cities can learn a lot from Paris – and its gardens

Squeezed between some of Paris’ busiest tourist attractions, and just steps from the Seine, is one of the capital’s newest public gardens.

It feels wild and rocky and, against all odds, off the beaten path. It exudes such a quiet touch it’s unnerving. Paris civic spaces are bold, even when they are understated – rarely do they blend into the background. Playful pruning, voluminous growth and other surprise twists mean all of them have personality.

This new garden replaced car parking and bare open space when it opened last year with – unusual for Paris – no fence and no prescribed seating. What it flaunts instead are such chunky stone outcrops and long sweeps of Mediterranean shrubs and perennials that you don’t feel like you’re in a city at all.

Established to honour the victims of the series of co-ordinated terrorist attacks that took place in Paris in November 2015, killing 130 people and shocking France, it is a place of both respite and remembrance. Designers Wagon Landscaping describe their plants as emerging from granite “like life reborn”.

People sit, stroll through and, in recent weeks, seek refuge from the bitingly hot temperatures that have been scorching Western Europe. They have been doing the same in about 550 other gardens all over town – sometimes deep into the night because during the recent heatwave they were kept open 24 hours a day, instead of closing in the evening as most usually do.

People also enjoyed the relative cool of the less defined new green spaces that are increasingly being established with varying degrees of formality throughout Paris. Because, while the capital’s grandest avenues and civic spaces have long been lined with planes, elms, lindens and chestnuts, other parts of the city have not been so lavished with greenery.

Over the past six years there has been a concerted drive to create more shade in all areas. Some 170,000 trees have been planted, and wide sweeps of paving lifted, to help lower temperatures and mitigate the Urban Heat Island effect in the face of climate warming. Swaths of perennials, annuals and grasses have also been added, helping to stem losses in biodiversity – and the planting drive continues.

In what is one of the most densely populated cities in Europe, plants are now growing on footpaths, beside metro stations, on newly pedestrianised roads, on closed railway lines, on car parking spaces and all sorts of other once-grey, hard spaces besides.

Much of this new planting feels loose and breezy but it often butts up against trees and shrubs that are meticulously pruned and that lend an overall sense of structure. Even more head-turning, the contemporary abundance is sometimes set against spaces that contain no vegetation at all.

One of the most dynamic landscapes in town contains not a single tree, flower or blade of grass.

French artist Daniel Buren did raise eyebrows with the 260 striped marble columns he fashioned for one end of the Palais-Royal courtyard in the mid-1980s, but 40 years later their popularity is plain to see. These columns of various heights create a sense of vibrancy that draws people in.

The black stripes of the columns bounce off the 17th-century walls of the palace with an austerity that, even in the face of global warming, seems perfect. They are even more theatrical than the 500 mature lindens and horse chestnuts growing across the other end of this courtyard. Teenagers sit on these columns, stand on them and congregate around them. A historic courtyard this might be but it’s teeming with contemporary life.

It’s like the way great crowds of people sunbake in bikinis on the lawn in Place des Vosges, the perfectly symmetrical square rimmed with fastidiously manicured rows of lindens and horse chestnuts in the Marais. This space might date back to the early 1600s and be the oldest planned square in Paris but some days it feels like the beach.

Similarly, at Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, the 19th-arrondissement park celebrated for its groundbreaking use of concrete in the 1860s, people casually picnic alongside simulated rocky cliffs, faux tree-branch balustrades and sweeps of new garden beds established to attract birds and insects.

One of the reasons Paris’ ballooning number of public landscapes are so beguiling is that they are not set in stone. The plant life changes, and how people use these spaces, too. In the recent record-breaking heat they were glorious.

Make the most of your health, relationships, fitness and nutrition with our Live Well newsletter. Get it in your inbox every Monday.