The garden by Gilles Clément
Gilles Clément (born 1943) · 2006
Pass through the gate in the glass wall and the city drops away. Paths of trodden earth and stone wind between clumps of tall reeds, meadows of grasses, oaks and maples, and low hills, and the museum hangs overhead on its stilts so that you walk beneath it in shade. There are no straight avenues and no flower beds. A hollow with a small pool, a turtle-shaped mound, glass discs in the paths that light up at night, and benches tucked among the plants make it a place to get slightly lost in the middle of the seventh arrondissement.
Gilles Clément is France's most influential living garden designer, known for the idea of the garden in movement, in which plants are allowed to seed and spread and the gardener follows rather than dictates. He conceived this garden as a savannah and a marsh, an image of the landscapes the collections come from without imitating any one of them. Look at how the planting is layered, tall grasses and reeds hiding the ground level, trees rising through them, and how the paths curve so that you never see the whole garden at once. The glass wall along the quay, printed with a faint pattern of foliage by Nouvel, reflects the greenery back and muffles the sound of the traffic.
The garden opened with the museum in 2006 and has grown dense and wild as Clément intended. It is free, opens earlier and closes later than the galleries, and is one of the pleasantest places to sit near the Eiffel Tower. At night a light installation by the artist Yann Kersalé turns the reeds into a field of glowing stems. If you have seen the collections, come back down and notice how the garden continues their story outside, an unfamiliar landscape planted in the heart of Paris.
Did You Know? The garden is free to enter and stays open later than the museum, so it doubles as a quiet park beside the Eiffel Tower.
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