Jardin des Plantes

Listen for a moment. Gravel crunches under your shoes, and long avenues of plane trees run ahead of you toward the Seine. Their branches are trimmed flat and square, so the trees form green walls. Somewhere nearby a gardener is watering a bed of flowers. On a still day you can smell wet soil and cut grass. Behind all of this, the low hum of Paris traffic continues. You are standing in one of the oldest gardens in the city.

This is the Jardin des Plantes, on the Left Bank in the fifth arrondissement. It did not begin as a park for strolling. It began as a garden of medicine. In 1635, a royal edict under King Louis the Thirteenth created a royal garden of medicinal plants. The driving force was Guy de La Brosse, a physician to the king. He wanted a place where students could study healing herbs while they grew, instead of reading about them in old books.

A few years later, in 1640, the garden opened its gates to the public. That was an unusual decision for the time. A royal garden was normally a private space for the court. Here, ordinary Parisians could walk among the beds and look at the plants. Lectures on botany, chemistry and anatomy were given, often in French rather than Latin. The university authorities of the time did not always welcome this competition. The garden became a place where science left the closed lecture hall.

The man who shaped much of what you see was Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. He ran the garden for nearly fifty years in the eighteenth century, until his death in 1788. Buffon was a naturalist and a writer. His huge work on natural history was read across Europe. As director, he bought neighbouring land and pushed the garden's borders toward the river. He also turned the collections into a serious centre of research.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. Look for the small hill covered with winding paths, known as the labyrinth. At its top stands a delicate metal gazebo called the Gloriette de Buffon. It was built in the 1780s. It is often described as one of the oldest metal structures in Paris. That is a century before the Eiffel Tower made iron the symbol of the city. Climb up, and you get a quiet view over the treetops.

On the way up the labyrinth, you pass a great spreading cedar of Lebanon. It was planted in the eighteenth century by the botanist Bernard de Jussieu. Locals love a charming story about it. Legend has it that Jussieu carried the young seedling from England in his hat, and shared his drinking water with it on the journey. Historians treat the tale with caution. But the tree itself is real, and its heavy horizontal branches are a fine sight.

Then came the Revolution. In 1793, the royal garden was transformed into the National Museum of Natural History. The name still covers the whole site today. A year later, the revolutionaries brought animals here, including survivors from the royal menagerie at Versailles. That collection became the Ménagerie, one of the oldest zoos in the world still open. It is small and intimate. Today it focuses on smaller and endangered species rather than large crowds of big animals.

The Ménagerie holds one of the garden's most moving stories. In 1827, a giraffe arrived in Paris. She was a gift from Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, to King Charles the Tenth. People called her Zarafa. After crossing the sea to Marseille, she walked the rest of the way to Paris, escorted by her keepers. Crowds lined the roads to see her. In the city, giraffe patterns became fashionable on fabrics and wallpaper. She lived here, in this garden, for many years.

The great minds of early natural science worked on these grounds. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck developed some of the first ideas about how species change over time. His statue stands near the entrance by the river. Georges Cuvier, a founder of comparative anatomy and palaeontology, studied fossils here. And a surprise for physics lovers: Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity in 1896 while working at the museum. So this garden of herbs also played a part in the story of the atom.

Now turn toward the long buildings that line the gardens. The largest is the Grand Gallery of Evolution. Inside, a parade of stuffed animals marches across the floor — elephants, giraffes, zebras — under a glass roof. The gallery reopened in its modern form in 1994. At the far end of the garden is the Gallery of Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy. There, hundreds of skeletons stand together, all facing the same direction. It looks like a herd of bones walking past you.

Take time for the glasshouses, the Grandes Serres. These tall iron and glass buildings date from the nineteenth century. Inside, the air changes at once. It becomes warm, wet and heavy with the smell of earth and leaves. You walk among tropical plants, giant ferns and desert cacti. On a cold Paris morning, stepping inside feels like a short journey to another climate. The glass fogs, and water drips softly from the leaves.

Outside, the garden keeps its original purpose: education. The long formal beds are arranged by plant family, with small labels in Latin and French. There is an alpine garden set slightly below ground level, where plants from high mountains grow among rocks. There is also a rose garden that fills with colour in early summer. Students sketch here. Retired Parisians read on the benches. Children run between the beds while their parents check the labels.

Before you leave, stop where you are and look along the avenue of plane trees. Nearly four centuries of gardeners have worked this ground. Physicians, kings, revolutionaries and scientists all walked these same paths. Today, the garden belongs to anyone who comes through the gate. As you walk out toward the river or the streets of the Latin Quarter, listen once more to the gravel under your feet... and notice which plant you will remember.