Garden-Related Sightings

Only two more days to submit your three favorite Panda-à-Paris posts! Send your list to panda.a.paris[at]gmail.com!

As you know, we're really excited to get back to our garden in Somerville. Thinking about spreading compost, collecting rainwater, and defending against pesty bugs and rodents occupies more of our time than it probably should. But we can't help it if springtime has awakened Paris' green thumb and stoked our imaginations.

Someone has planted a container garden on the steps of La Madeleine. We don't know who did it, but we're pleased. Even better, this coming Sunday and Monday, the Champs-Elysées will be turned into a massive pedestrian zone and filled with soil, grass, cows, and agricultural delights of all kinds. The program is called "Nature Capitale" and we will surely be visiting.

We saw this nascent container garden at the Parc Montsouris and raged internally. It's time to plant stuff! Get on it!!

If we were staying in Paris through the summer, we might have signed up for the service advertised here - a farm share delivered to your neighborhood! And of course it's called "potager." This doesn't look quite as "organic" (both in the sense of how the food's grown and how the organization is run) as the farm shares we know in Somerville, but no matter - it's still exciting to see the idea catching on in France's biggest city.

Looking Forward

Ever since we bought our tickets for the trip home, our thoughts have increasingly turned to life in Somerville, to summertime activities, to seeing old friends and - most importantly - to the joy we will experience at being reunited with our kitchen and all the kitchen-related conveniences we left behind. (For all our friends reading this: we're only excited about the kitchen because it'll provide the venue for reuniting with all of you! So, we're cool, right?)

One summertime activity we've been thinking about pretty intensely in recent days is cultivating our garden. (And I don't mean that metaphorically.) Ever since spring started sneaking into Paris, blowing away the oppressive winter grisaille, we've started coordinating with our downstairs neighbors back in S-ville to plan this year's garden. Last year's was pretty epic, so we have a legacy to perpetuate:

Planning for this year's garden started with a call for blueprints for vegetable/fruit/flower arrangements in the limited space of our front yard. I sent around a blank schematic, then filled it in with this xkcd-inspired proposal:

Tell me that's not an awesome drawing of our front yard. Who knew I had such talent? Maggie knew - that's why she has decided to take our garden planning to the next level, drafting her proposal with actual garden-planning software.

Maggie's also taking a cue from French garden design, attempting to balance aesthetic and utilitarian elements in what's known as a "potager" garden. This basically means organizing everything - vegetables and/or flowers - in an aesthetically pleasing arrangement which is often symmetrical. Potager gardens are not microcosms of what we imagine to be the "old family farm," with everything in straight lines, and every vegetable in its own section (also see: my proposal above). Example of the French potager garden:

You can find this potager garden behind the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, in the 4th arrondissement. Notice how it combines a winter lettuce with silver tongue and something else (I'm no horticulturalist), all bound by a hedge.

What do you think - should we go with the French-style potager? Or do you prefer my American-heartland-inspired design?