Green

It could be the gravel. It can’t be the map. A map of Paris in color shows green everywhere, big splashes and little clots. The Jardin du Luxembourg is such a big green that it engulfs a third of the Sixth Arrondissement, and the First is practically not there if you subtract the Tuileries and the Jardin du Carrousel to the west of the Louvre. Little points of green—like the Square de Montholon, the Jardin Blanc, the Place des États Unis, the Parc Ste-Périne, and dozens more just as unfamiliar and obscure except to the neighbors—sprout in every quartier like weeds finding a foothold in the cracks of the pavement, except they are so nicely groomed and spaced. Add in the tiny parks, the ones so small the map-makers have no room to print their names, and you would think that Paris must be the greenest city on earth.

It is not. It is puzzling to me and always has been. For years I have thought it must be the gravel the city uses for the paths in the parks. They are always wide, allowing plenty of room for pedestrians, the cyclists, and babies being wheeled, and so broad I wonder if the parks should be drawn on the maps with stripes of green and tan. They make me thirsty, the gravel paths. But where the parks are green, with trees and carefully cut lawns upon which it is always formally forbidden to walk, they are very green. Maybe it’s not the gravel, not entirely, anyway.

It could be the streets. Some of the grander ones, the Boulevard Raspail and the Avenue Foch with its splendid double margins of trees, are leafy, but there is no grass anywhere near them. People park their cars between the trees on Raspail, and the trees on Foch are planted in islands of still more Parisian gravel. Leafy and lovely, all right, but perfunctory, as if to say, “Here’s a tree, and look, there’s another one!”

The trees look discontinuous—an odd phrase, I know, and maybe one that has never been written before, but that’s how green grows in Paris on the major streets. The smaller streets have no trees at all: they are narrow, the immeubles bump right up to the building lines, and there is no place on the scanty sidewalks for those little strips of green called margins, medians, swales, or trees boxes in the States. Where there is space—and I have no idea how space might be defined—for a parc, a place, or a square, Paris will plant. If not, not, and that’s that. And ivy does not climb up the façades of Parisian apartment houses—there’s no room for even the little earth ivy needs to grow and, besides, it would pull the building down! Really?

Who knows? But maybe I’m getting it all wrong, coming at the la question de verdure parisienne from the wrong angle of approach, wandering down the wrong street in the wrong direction. A fault of logic, against French law and custom. I must apply more inductive reasoning and start all over with the particular.

Back to the small streets as my point de départ. They are ungreen for all the sufficient reasons as I have understood them. The grander streets, like Raspail with broader sidewalks, can accommodate trees, but not grass between them. Grass is reserved for the little parks while grass and trees are for the bigger parks (in both cases heavily punctuated with gravel) and of course the cemeteries. Then what? That’s easy: the lungs of Paris, les poumons de Paris, the great woods to the west and east of the city, Le Bois de Boulogne and Le Bois de Vincennes, tamed forests, landscaped and combed, but enormous, Boulogne being big enough to hide New York’s Central Park twice with room for a dozen soccer stadiums into the bargain.

This is beginning to make sense. It is not so much a geographic gradation of greenery—not at all parallel to the uncoiling of the Arrondissements from a notional center point—but a hierarchy with covert logic that pushes greenery ever upward, up being the size of the park relative to the street until the streets vanish altogether before the undisputed assertion of grass and trees dans les Bois.

If this makes sense, it also makes me feel I have been missing the point for too many years and am an unregenerate American, maybe a rube, un pecquenot. Paris has put its largest parks, called Woods, mind you, at the fringes of the city: it was only in 1929 that the Bois de Boulogne, once the countryside, was annexed and nailed to the far edge of the Sixteenth Arrondissement. American cities put their great parks (when they have them) where you have to trip over them—Central Park or the Emerald Necklace around Boston, both craftily laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted to look half-feral, or Rock Creek Park in Washington, a forest slicing through the city and creating some of the most confused driving in the world.

There’s more. American cities love trees and keep them or plant them wherever they can possibly grow. Mayors have appointed urban foresters to inventory and catalogue them, foundations compete to donate them where there are not enough, neighbors plant them with little dedicatory plaques for departed friends (I don’t think I’d ever try to explain this to a Parisian), and urban planners delight in talking about the urban canopy as if cities were rain forests with parking meters. I have stumbled on narrow sidewalks in Washington where the trees, some taller than the houses, have simply broken the pavement and make walking in the street the only possible choice, but the trees grow, they are green, they are there. And so are the grass margins, though like as not trod into hard, brown submission by those of us who can’t find room on the sidewalk. And so too are little strips of land between the sidewalk and the building line, because American apartment houses are set back and their owners attempt gardens, giving up uncounted mètres quarrés of perfectly good and numbingly expensive living space in order to… I’m not sure what.

But I like them. I like them because they lack Paris’s green logic, not to mention Paris’s green parsimony, the careful doling out of grass and trees according to a plan. This is strange, because Paris, despite Baron Haussmann’s best efforts, cherishes chaos and controlled disorder—consider its street system—nor is the invisible guiding hand of some Great Planner present or rather it has a lighter touch than the hand that laid out the grids of America’s waffle-iron cities. Maybe the wildness of Parisian streets is enough without the wild American improvisation of little strips of garden here and there, with no particular reason, and trees sitting untouchable on valuable real estate.

Paris requires reason, and so despite all the parks and trees it is not green. It’s a puzzle, always has been, and no doubt will continue to be—my puzzle, in any event. Maybe it’s not the gravel. It could be me. But maybe not. As I walk down residential streets and look up, I see what Parisians are growing on their balconies—flower boxes with geraniums here and there to be sure, but so often trees, shrubs, climbing and hanging greenery, creating aerial oases that refresh the walker in the city even if they don’t show up on the maps.

© Joseph Lestrange