Park It: Paris in Spring

How to see Paris in the spring? The parks!

I recently spent a week in Paris with my 17-year-old. We did all the wonderful, usual things: cafe sits, strolls along the Seine, monuments and museums, so many, many pastries. Escaping the bitter cold of the Midwest for the front-end of spring, our plans tended to take shape around maximizing time in the much-needed sunshine. We didn’t have a single day of rain—a miracle in Paris in the spring!—so we quickly slipped into flaneur mode with long, meandering walks and little care for tickets, entry times, or reservations (aside from a few highly anticipated restaurants). What emerged, only visible in retrospect, is a fresh air, park-forward approach to exploring the city.

Like with most teenagers, a certain amount of museum fatigue is bound to set in, so instead of rushing around to every new exhibition in town, we pegged cultural destinations—less crowded, but no less interesting—to park outings by proximity. Even if you don’t have a tourist-averse teenager to consider, it’s a brilliant way to organize your time and bring your outside-inside ratio into balanced proportion. Or for times when the Louvre and Tuileries just feel like a bit too much.

1. JARDIN DES PLANTES » The Grande Mosquée

Known for: Originally named the Royal Garden of Medicinal Plants, the garden was created in 1635 as a place to teach botany and train physicians in plant medicine. Today, it’s an open-to-all beauty pageant of floral varietals (23,000 species!), trees and plants. Laid out in long slender repeating rows, bursting with blooms of every color and variety spread across 70 acres. Even in mid-March, the tulips, poppies and iconic white cherry blossoms really bring the heart palpitations. Go early: the morning is quiet, the afternoon is bananas. And don’t make my mistake of missing the Alpine Garden—sunk 10 feet to create a microclimate for mountain plants. The entrance can be found inside the Botanical School.