Jardin des plantes
The origins of le Jardin des Plantes lie in the rarely mentioned fact that its founder, King Louis XIII, had a personal doctor from Montpellier, Jean Héroard, whose loyal services had also been used by Charles IX, Henri III and Henri IV. On September 27, 1610 the future king Louis XIII was nearly stillborn after 22 hours of labor in the Fontainbleau castle. His mother Marie de Medicis neither touched nor looked at the "dauphin" – she was too exhausted. His father, King Henri IV, paced around grunting in despair, remembering the previous miscarriages. The midwife applied all her strength to bring the royal heir apparent back to life. In the delivery room Jean Héroard kept scribbling in his journal, jotting down every hopeful movement the prince would make, cogitating, licking his quill. His diary would come to be over ten thousand pages long – all about the prince's health, sport and education. Something had to be done to save his life.
This was repeated until the prince suddenly raised his tiny hands to his mouth as if kissing them gratefully (according to Héroard). His heart started beating and he began breathing. Henri IV thanked God and the Virgin Marie for the miracle. And more bottles were brought up from the cellar.
During his short but dramatic life, Louis XIII – the Just, as he was called – had Jean Héroard constantly by his side. In 1626 Héroard convinced the king that a botanical garden that his colleague Guy de la Brosse had suggested in a letter was needed in order to have all the medicinal herbs for his ailments at hand. There was land outside the Parisian fortifications at the Clos Cloypeau on the faubourg Saint Victor near the river owned by the apothecatry Nicolas Houel. It had been young Louis XIII's playground. It was planted with fruit trees and herbs, amongst them "petun", or tobacco
Jean Héroard died in 1628 during the siege of La Rochelle; it was only in 1635 that le jardin du roi received its royal blessings. The Clos Cloypeau (bordering what is now the rue Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire) was acquired and its irrigation constructed from Rungis from where the Bièvre river also fed the Luxembourg garden and Saint Germain de pres with fresh water. Guy de la Brosse began transforming the garden, planting herbs brought from all over the world. Once the plants had reached maturity a few years later, the garden opened to the public. Lectures were held in French instead of Latin to anyone willing to attend, which fanned the wrath of the powerful Sorbonne University whose courses were given in Latin. They didn't want competition and accused their ideas as "modern" – but the future faculty of natural science was born.
In 1739 Buffon was named administrator of the jardin du roi. George-Louis Leclerc Buffon was born in Montbard in 1707 and studied mathematics, although he had an inclination towards botany, zoology as well as mineralogy. He came to Paris very young and rose in rank by introducing himself into the "salons" that were the necessary footing to get anywhere. His knowledge of minerals and a small family fortune allowed him to start a forge in Montbard that supplied cast iron railings and guns for the state and which eventually made him quite wealthy. He expanded the jardin du roi under his supervision all the way to the banks of the Seine, and new buildings were added, including a 600 seat amphitheatre. He began publishing his now famous Histoire naturelle in collaboration with botanist Daubenton. His popular writing brought him the ire of the clerics for questioning the validity of the Genesis – the creation of the world according to the bible. Despite the rivalry Buffon had the ambition to create an Academy of Science where the animal, mineral and vegetable elements could be studied together as in an open air university, for the purpose of observation, comparison and comprehension. Buffon is generally considered as the founder of anthropology, and as such he was a humanist. Luckily for him he died in 1788 and was spared the guillotine. Instead his son who had succeeded as administrator suffered this fate; his last words supposedly were "Je suis un Buffon", echoed by laughter from the populace who watched his head roll.
During the French Revolution La Convention officially decreed the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle under a new minister of public instruction. In 1795 Bernard de Saint-Pierre and Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire then created the zoo – one of the oldest in the western world – incorporating three wildlife collections, later confiscated by police, and the surviving animals from the royal menageries.
Renowned professors lectured here, amongst them Cuvier, Hauy, Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire, Vauquelin, Langier, Lacépède, Lamarck, Jussieu, Portal, and Thouin, leading to the golden age of French natural sciences during the XIX century.
Meet Claude Bureaux
Je suis jardinier, he says humbly. He started as a gardener in the Jardin des plantes in 1964. Today he is director of communications – "diffusions des connaissances" – of the Musée National de Histoire Naturelle.
Claude Bureaux's office in a pavilion off 43 rue Buffon is not modern, as he apologetically says; there are no computers and only a fax and coffee machine sit idly in a corner. His desk is covered with notepads, both small and large, and pen and paper, wooden boxes and his tobacco pouch. On the walls are certificates and honors for his work in gardening and horticulture. Le Bon Jardinier, the most important encyclopedia on gardening, stands at hand in one of the many bookshelves.
The difference in being a gardener in the Jardin des Plantes as opposed to working for the city or a bourgeois employer is that the gardener in the former decides what kind of plants to grow. The gardeners don't have a political agenda, nor are they directly accountable to anyone. And everybody working there is treated as an equal; it is some kind of scientific community without the kind of pecking order you would find in a company. The Museum does not make a profit, has a meager budget from the state, and doesn't have enough money to properly feed the animals in the zoo.
The phone keeps ringing and Claude Bureaux is communicating his next cours – how to prune roses?
Oui madame, from 13 to 17 March. Bring a sécateur, gloves... solid shoes and a coat in case of rain. And don't forget to check up on your latest tetanus shot. (The poet Rainer Maria Rilke died from tetanus pruning his roses.)
Pruning roses is a very popular occupation taught by gardeners of the Jardin des Plantes for free. Reservations (until Feb. 28): 01 40 79 33 25
Rendez-vous in front the statue of Lamarck at the entrance facing the gare d'Austerlitz.
To visit:
You enter the Jardin des Plantes either from the pont d'Austerlitz (where you find the zoo to your right and an incredible collection of bones and fossils to the left, in the paleontology gallery of the museum) or from across the Mosqué de Paris, where you immediately see la grande galerie du musée which has a permanent collection of choice minerals, fossils, interactive evolution games, and much more. It also has an auditorium where regular conferences are given.
Two hothouses (one of which is presently closed) face each other if you walk towards the small hill with a pagoda on top and a labyrinth all around it. Besides the herbier – herb garden and alpine garden – there are enough plants to discover. The major attractions lately have been the rose garden, and the very efficiently restored zoo where Reiner Maria Rilke once wrote a poem entitled ‘Der Panther’.
Bibliography:
Guy Barthèlemy, Les Jardiniers du Roy petite histoire du jardin des plantes, Paris 1979
Websites:
Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle
www.parisiana.com
Article copyright 2006 Einar Moos
parisiana.com
