Garden of the Greenhouses of Auteuil
Photo: Salix / CC BY-SA 3.0, modified.
Overview
The Japanese Garden at the Jardin des Serres d’Auteuil is a small Japanese-style garden area within Paris’s historic greenhouse and botanical garden complex. The wider garden combines late nineteenth-century greenhouse architecture, municipal horticultural production history and botanical collections. Paris’s official site describes Serres d’Auteuil as an eclectic garden bringing together different testimonies of garden art, exotic plant collections and historical greenhouse architecture.
History
The Serres d’Auteuil site has older botanical roots, but the present garden and greenhouse complex were created between 1895 and 1898 under Jean-Camille Formigé, then chief architect of the Paris Promenades and Plantations service. The Japanese garden itself was opened in 1965. According to the Japanese Gardens Outside Japan database, it covers about 300 square metres and was both designed and constructed by Kōzō Iwatani. In 1998, the site became part of the Jardin botanique de la Ville de Paris and parts of the garden and buildings were protected as historic monuments.
Design features
The Japanese-style section is a compact ornamental garden within a larger botanical setting. It should be treated as a thematic Japanese-style garden area rather than as a standalone historic Japanese garden. The wider Serres d’Auteuil garden includes formal garden structure, tropical greenhouses, botanical collections and ornamental garden areas; visitor-facing material also mentions a koi pond, reinforcing the garden’s East Asian / Japanese visual layer, though not enough to reconstruct a full design history for the Japanese section.
Garden elements
Stones
Other elements
Current status
Extant small Japanese-style garden section within the Jardin des Serres d’Auteuil, one of the four sites of the Jardin botanique de la Ville de Paris. The wider Serres d’Auteuil garden is a historic municipal botanical garden created in its present form between 1895 and 1898 by architect Jean-Camille Formigé for the City of Paris. The Japanese-style garden appears to be a later thematic garden feature within this eclectic botanical and horticultural site. The site is publicly accessible during garden opening hours.