History of parks and gardens of Paris

Main article: List of parks and gardens in Paris
The Parc des Buttes Chaumont is a picturesque landscape garden opened by Napoleon III in 1867.
The first flight of a hydrogen balloon took place from the Tuileries garden on December 1, 1783.
A "floating garden" of the Promenade des Berges de la Seine (2013), a 2.3 kilometer long park along the left bank of Seine in the 7th arrondissement.

Paris today has more than 421 municipal parks and gardens, covering more than three thousand hectares and containing more than 250,000 trees.[1][verification needed] Two of Paris's oldest and most famous gardens are the Tuileries Garden, created in 1564 for the Tuileries Palace, and redone by André Le Nôtre in 1664;[2][full citation needed] and the Luxembourg Garden, belonging to a château built for Marie de' Medici in 1612, which today houses the French Senate.[3][full citation needed] The Jardin des Plantes was the first botanical garden in Paris, created in 1626 by Louis XIII's doctor Guy de La Brosse for the cultivation of medicinal plants.[4] Between 1853 and 1870, the Emperor Napoleon III and the city's first director of parks and gardens, Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, created the Bois de Boulogne, the Bois de Vincennes, Parc Montsouris and the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, located at the four points of the compass around the city, as well as many smaller parks, squares and gardens in the neighborhoods of the city.[1] One hundred sixty-six new parks have been created since 1977, most notably the Parc de la Villette (1987–1991) and Parc André Citroën (1992).[1]

Some of the most notable recent gardens of Paris are not city parks, but parks belonging to museums, including the gardens of the Rodin Museum and the Musée du quai Branly or smaller intimate gardens of the Musée Delacroix or Musée de la Vie romantique.

  1. ^ a b c Jarrassé, Dominique, Grammaire des jardins Parisiens
  2. ^ Lawrence & Gondrand 2010, p. 125.
  3. ^ Lawrence & Gondrand 2010, p. 208.
  4. ^ "Le Jardin de Plantes". Muséum national d’histoire naturelle. Retrieved 22 June 2013.