Parc Montsouris

If we wrote a coffee table book called "A Year in the Herbe: 365 Parisian Parks," would you buy it? Because the more we walk around the city, the more impressed we are by the gads of green spaces the city manages to tuck away in every neighborhood, and we feel that Paris deserves recognition for something other than food, art, architecture, history, and other boring stuff.

Take the Parc Montsouris in the 14th arrondissement, for example. It boasts a lake, a guignol, a bandstand, pony rides, gorgeous landscaping, and lots of grass on which to lounge.


In all this, of course, the Parc Montsouris is not so different from the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, "our" park. The two were commissioned around the same time by Emperor Napoleon III and Baron Haussman, and were intended as the north and south anchors of the city's park system (the Bois de Vincennes in the east and the Bois de Boulogne in the west are the other two). One thing the Parc des Buttes Chaumont doesn't have, though: the RER B splitting it in two, or any station within the park.

But hey, who's keeping track?