Square Louis XVI

The little park around the Chapelle Expiatoire on boulevard Haussman is traditionally planted with white flowers, in memory of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. So it was somehow fitting to visit yesterday during a major snowstorm in Paris. Everything was rapidly being engulfed in deep, soft whiteness. This place was once the cemetery of La [...]

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Cool plants for hot days

The gardens of the Hotel Biron are currently a sea of creamy hydrangeas and soft green foliage. A few weeks ago I posted on the lush roses and paeonies that filled the grounds in June. It appeared to be the peak of the summer. But now everywhere is a mass of lacecaps and mopheads, all [...]

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Rainbows and daisies

At one of the side entrances to l’Eglise Saint Germain des Prés in the 6th arrondissement are four little box-edged flower beds. This summer, one of them is thickly planted with rainbow-stemmed swiss chard, pink cosmos and dahlias. (There are also some rather unnecessary, straggly standard roses.) My daughter and I stood for a few [...]

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Ecole des Beaux-Arts

The Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts was established in the seventeenth century and, in its heyday, was an enormously influential school for architects, painters and sculptors throughout the world. Its alumnae include Degas, Delacroix, Givenchy, Monet and Mary Cassatt. Its current home in the 6th arrondissement was built on the site of an early seventeenth [...]

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Roses and Rodin

Someone asked me the other day about “secret” places in Paris, where it would be fun to take visitors. One of my suggestions was the garden of the Hôtel Biron in the 7th arrondissement. OK, so the building is not exactly a secret, as it currently serves as the musée Rodin, which receives about half [...]

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