As a garden writer and photographer, I’ve been in countless private and public gardens around the world: botanical gardens, display gardens, community gardens, country estates where money flows like water, and tiny balconies where each plant is a considered investment.

Rarely do I find myself at a loss for words.

But that was exactly how I felt when I walked into Parc André-Citroën in Paris. Stretching over 35 acres on the west side of the left bank of the Seine, this futuristic park was created on a vast, sprawling site where the old Citroën auto factory had stood for more than a half-century. Costing a staggering $74-million (U.S.) to build, it opened in 1992 and has been described as one of the most ambitious design projects to have been undertaken in Paris since the Second Empire.

For the many layers of French government involved in the project, the park was just one bold master stroke on a much bigger canvas of urban renewal in this once-sleepy suburb. It was about taking a devastated industrial space and, like the phoenix from the ashes, creating a new neighborhood filled with housing and jutting skyscrapers, their sharp-edged, gleaming architecture softened by and reflecting the leafy green oasis they overlook. A post-modern interpretation of the city green, it represents the best and most imaginative achievement of that curious blend of romance and socialism that is France.

Water – The Unifying Element

Designed by landscape architects Gilles Clement and Alain Provost in conjunction with architects Patrick Berger, Jean-Paul Viguier and Jean-François Jodry, the park is breathtaking in its sheer size, scope and post-modernist symbolism.

As if paying homage to the mighty Seine flowing nearby, water -- an acre of it, by surface area -- is the connecting thread flowing through the landscape. The numerous water features are mostly contained and formal, yet they evoke – often playfully -- the power of water in nature.

There is the Grand Canal; smaller canals flanking the expansive lawns; layered rapids that splash downward between black marble “banks” and disappear under the walkway; a vast, shallow peristyle between the giant glasshouses featuring rows of island planters with clipped, columnar magnolias; sloping runnels with waterlilies; and a large terrace sparkling with dozens of lisières or water spouts, delighting the children cavorting in them

The myriad water features in the park stand in stark and ironic contrast to the thirsty fountains on the grounds of Versailles, just an hour or so away, and so lacking in adequate reserves that they can only be turned for a few hours once a week in summertime, lest they run dry.

Gardens of Light and Shade

Along Rue Saint-Charles at the upper boundary of the park are two large gardens designed as opposites: the White Garden (1 hectare) and the Black Garden (2 hectares).

The White Garden (Jardin Blanc) is filled with sunshine, and has a small central enclosure surrounded by high walls and containing white-flowered plants. But the main thrust of this space is a large playground for children in the neighborhood or those of park visitors.

The Black Garden (Jardin Noir), on the other hand, is quite shady and planted densely with shrubs and trees having dark-green foliage. Here sombre yews and pines are artfully clipped to look like giant bonsai. Thin sheets of water cascade over dark granite walls designed to suggest a labyrinth, and steps lead to a small central square with lots of little nooks that are perfect for relaxing.

The Serial Gardens: Colors, Minerals and Senses

A special favorite of visitors are the six small but elegant Serial Gardens.

Lined up along the northeast edge of the park and separated from each other by gently sloping, concrete rapids, each garden here is defined by three things: a dominant color, a specific mineral or metal, and one of the five human senses.

The Red Garden corresponds to the mineral bauxite and to our sense of taste. It contains plants that have fruit or berries, or that possibly turn color in fall. When I was there, a brilliant, gold-leafed European elder was spangled with clusters of bright-red berries.

The Silver Garden, of course, relates to silver and its sensory element is sight. Indeed, visitors require excellent vision and nimble-footedness to cross the Zen-style gravel garden on a zigzag bridge of raised, stepping-stones. Appropriately, the foliage of the drought-tolerant shrubs in the beds flanking the hot gravel terrace is silver, gray or glaucous-blue.

The Green Garden evokes the mineral copper and its swishing, ruffling, ornamental grasses remind visitors of the importance of creating a sense of sound in the landscape. Sheared holly-oak (Quercus ilex) forms leafy walls in this garden and even some of the flowers, such as the ‘Viridiflora’ rose, have greenish blossoms.

The Orange Garden suggests iron-ore and is linked to our sense of touch, evoked by textural foliage and clever effects like a rippled ramp and walkway paved with bumpy stones.

The Blue Garden represents the mineral mercury and is filled with aromatic foliage and often-perfumed blue and purple blossoms that appeal to a visitor’s sense of smell. When I was there, gorgeous ornamental sages and lavender were in bloom, their pungent scent released by the hot June sun. And under a long, airy, black metal pergola wreathed in purple clematis and slowly dripping water into a hollowed stone below, an elegant, elderly French woman lay on a chaise longue sunning herself and reading, quite, oblivious to the tourists walking nearby.

The Gold Garden is associated with that precious mineral and features plants with chartreuse or golden foliage, such as the lovely ‘Frisia’ black locust that was luminous in the shadows the day I visited. Here, the landscape architects, rather enigmatically, have asked visitors to contemplate “the sixth sense”.

A Garden of Movement

The Jardin en Mouvement or Garden in Motion sits at the northern end of the site. In contrast to the formality and structure of the rest of the park (so like the disciplined French landscape style style to which we’re accustomed), this part is where visitors feel that only nature is in control. Indeed, the designers tell us that the plants blooming here are in perpetual movement in both time and space. “In time, because the flowering is spread right through the year, and in space, because plants seen at a particular spot on a particular day will not grow there again.”

The palette here includes informal plants such as bamboo, ferns, delicate mosses, overgrown shrub heavy with small blossoms and many plants that will self-seed, such as willow-herb and mullein.

As if fulfilling the wishes of the designers, there is life and constant motion in this wild area. Lunchtime joggers run along a curving path through a wild meadow spangled with colourful wildflowers; lovers chat and embrace on a bench; and under the watchful eyes of their mother, two small children clamber across giant boulders nestled in such a way that they seem to have always been there.

Glass, Stone and Steel

Even while walking through wildflowers and rustling grasses, however, the visitor is always aware of the architectural framework of the park: its lines, axes, walls, floors, geometry and linkage to the modern built form, both inside the site and on its periphery. Indeed the twin 15 x 45 meter glasshouses, one containing Mediterranean plants and the other housing an orangery, look for all the world like translucent crystalline cubes.

And the proximity of the park to the adjacent office buildings with their reflective surfaces and angular forms could be imagined as a post-modern updating of the ancient monastic concept of enclosure and sanctuary: garden walls of steel and glass, but garden walls, nonetheless.

Nowhere in the park is this duality more striking than in the Garden of Metamorphosis. Here plants grown in a series of beds and hedges have been chosen for the way they’ll alter in appearance throughout the seasons, perhaps developing tawny seedheads in summer like the June-blooming alliums, or turning a rich hue in autumn like the burning bush.

It’s almost a metaphor for the garden itself, which will surely metamorphose from this infant creation of the third empire to a landscape as enduring and endearing as Versailles itself.

Parc André-Citroën is open every day. Admission is free. Located on Quai André-Citroën/Rue Leblanc/Rue St. Charles in the 15^th arrondissement. Take the Metro to Balard or Javel station (it was here that bleach was discovered in the 18^th century, hence the name) and walk to the park. For more information, visit their website.

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