Jardin du Luxembourg

From Paris Hotels Reviews

Jardin du Luxembourg

Hemingway liked to claim he fed himself in Paris by shooting pigeons in the Jardin du Luxembourg, immediately south of the Odéon theatre. These lovely gardens belong to the Palais du Luxembourg, which fronts onto the eastern end of rue de Vaugirard, Paris’s longest street. Today, palace and garden alike belong to the French Senate, but they were originally built for Marie de Médicis, Henri IV’s widow, as distant northern echo of the Palazzo Pitti and Boboli gardens of her native Florence.

The gardens (open roughly dawn to dusk; RER Luxembourg/M° Odéon) are the Left Bank’s heart and quiet possibly its lungs as well. They get fantastically crowded on summer days, when the most contested spots are the shady Fontaine de Médicis in the northeast corner and the tails of the gardens that points south towards the Paris observatory – the latter being the only place where you’re allowed to sit out on the lawns. Everywhere else you’ll have to settle yourself on the heavy, sage-green metal chairs, which are liberally distributed around the gravel paths. Alternatively, there’s a delightful tree-shaded café roughly 100m northeast of the central pond.

Children rent toy yachts to sail on the pond, but the western side is the more active area, with tennis courts, donkey rides, a marionette show for children, a large playground and inevitable sandy area for boules. Sculptures are scattered around the park, including an 1890 monument to the painter Delacroix by Jules Dalou and a suitably bizarre homage to the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard by the sculptor Ossip Zadkine, more of whose works can be seen in the nearby Musée Zadkine. In the quieter, wooded, western section of the park you can also find one of Paris’s miniature versions of the Statue of Liberty, just bigger than human-size, and cast in bronze. The southwest corner ends in a miniature orchard of elaborately espaliered pear trees whose fruits grace the tables of senators or, if surplus to requirements, are given to associations for the homeless.

In the last wee of September, the half-glazed Orangerie, just west of the main palace, is the venue for the annual "Expo-Automne", which shows off the garden’s finest fruits and floral decorations. For the rest of the winter, it shelters scores of exotic trees – palms, bitter oranges, oleanders and pomegranates, some over two hundred years old – which are grown in giant pots so that every winter they can be wheeled indoors, and then wheeled out again the following spring.

The north-south spine of the gardens extends down into a tail pointing towards the Paris observatory, following the line of the old Paris meridian. at the extreme southern end of the gardens, the circular Fontaine de l’Observatoire symbolizes Paris’s historic self-conception as the very navel of the world, with Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s fine sculptures of the four continents supporting a mighty iron globe.