Paris is a city of secret gardens. Wandering the streets and gardens of Paris a few weeks ago, I found 10 garden ideas to steal.
Photography by Michelle Slatalla.
A small courtyard garden in the Marais takes advantage of all available growing space—including the walls.
The Layered Look
Engulfing a garden shed, roses and ivies create a curtain of greenery to keep the focus on the plants.
Hidden Hardscape
Camouflage for Cans
Tucked into a nook between a staircase and a retaining wall, garbage cans hidden beneath a simple roof in an open-air enclosure.
In a city, a windowsill can double as a garden plot. A deep sill accommodates small pots and planters.
Windowsill Gardens
You can mix colors and heights of roses easily because the uniform shape of rose leaves and petals will tie the look together. And remember: choosing roses for their scent is as least as important as choosing them for color.
Mix-and-Match Roses
Thirty years ago, abstract artist Daniel Buren created an art installation of 252 black-and-white marble and concrete columns in the courtyard at the Palais Royal.
Black-and-White Palette
The columns, designed to match striped awnings on the palace windows, hide hide ventilation shafts in the former parking lot and look as shockingly modern today as three decades ago when protesters got a stop-work order to temporarily delay the installation.
Beneath an allée of trees in the garden behind the Musée Rodin a gray gravel path feels soft underfoot.
Gravel Paths
It is impossible to escape Versailles. But in a modern update, those boxwood balls are often plastic.
Fake Plants
Wild Gardens
Soften the architecture of a formal facade with unruliness.
In the Tuileries, the geometry of clipped hedges and twin shrubbery circles is undercut by unruly flower borders and waves of lavender.
Symmetry