The Japanese garden of Paris is dedicated to Albert Kahn.
This place isn’t just one of the French capital’s many green spaces, but a little corner of paradise built in the name of peace and interculturality.
Like the beautiful Basilica of Saint-Denis, it’s the ideal spot if you want to escape the usual tourist sights of Paris and get away from the historic centre.
The Japanese garden of Paris isn’t very big, but it’s perfect for a walk when spring begins to peek through the cold winter days. I was lucky enough to visit it in exactly this season, and I was truly amazed by the colours and scents that wrap around you as you walk.
Needless to say, like the Bagatelle rose garden, the Albert-Kahn garden is cared for down to the smallest detail.
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Why visit the Japanese garden of Paris
The Japanese garden of Paris isn’t as big as the Luxembourg Gardens, nor as rich in flowers as the more famous Bagatelle rose garden, but it absolutely deserves a visit for two fundamental reasons.
The first is the extreme care and beauty of the plants and flowers that have their home here. The second is the wonderful philanthropic message that its founder wanted to pass on to posterity.
But what is it about?
Albert Kahn was a visionary banker and patron. His aim was to create a space where the cultures of the world could merge and slide gently into one another, through the art of gardening.
That’s why the walk begins with a typical Japanese garden, then crosses a French garden, an English one, a contemporary Japanese garden and two small forests (a “blue” one of cedars and one that recalls the Vosges).
A fun fact: the same spirit drove Kahn’s most famous undertaking, the Archives de la Planète. Between 1909 and 1931 he funded and sent photographers to more than fifty countries to document the world’s peoples and landscapes in colour (using the autochrome technique), before they could disappear. The result was one of the most extraordinary photographic collections ever made: over 70,000 colour plates, today kept right here, at the museum.
The route inside the Albert-Kahn garden
The Japanese garden of Paris is packed with detail!
You go from a rose garden to a pond where water lilies bloom, from a Japanese bridge to the “blue” trees of the forest, from little Japanese houses to a great glass greenhouse.
For me it was wonderful to see how cultures can dialogue through nature!
The passage from one section to another, in fact, doesn’t happen abruptly, but seems a slow, natural evolving of plants and flowers. As if plants and cultures could merge into one another.
I found it a powerfully inspiring message about breaking down the boundaries set up by man.
A detail you may not know: after more than five years of works, in 2022 the Albert-Kahn museum reopened with a new building by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, inspired by Japanese tradition (the engawa, the threshold space between inside and outside, and the sudare, bamboo screens). A dialogue between France and Japan perfectly in tune with Kahn’s dream.
Practical information for visiting the Japanese garden
How to get there. From the centre of Paris you can reach the Japanese garden on metro line 10, getting off at the terminus Boulogne – Pont de Saint-Cloud and following the signs. Getting lost is almost impossible!
Tickets and hours. Since the museum reopened, admission (which includes the garden, the permanent collections and the temporary exhibitions) costs 9 euros (reduced 6 euros) and is free for under-26s and on the first Sunday of the month. The garden can be visited all year round, but during the cherry-blossom season there’s a long queue and it’s especially crowded: it’s worth it all the same. At weekends there’s always a fair amount of footfall. You can check up-to-date hours and prices on the museum’s official website.
Good to know. You can’t picnic inside the garden and you can’t enter with prams, but the cloakroom is free.
Are you a flower lover like me? Then you’ll also fall for the Bagatelle rose garden and the calm of Place des Vosges, two more green corners of Paris that I adore.
