Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (9 page)

As we walked slowly through his little garden, he tested our knowledge in a type of name-that-plant agricultural quiz show. The radishes, a bay leaf tree, tomatoes, leeks, artichokes, celery, and strawberries were easy enough. He then moved on to more challenging plants, like lovage and cinnamon basil. His fearlessness in his gardening was endearing—as was his row of Chasselas grapes, though the 2010 humid conditions made it impossible to grow them without being affected by moldy fungus. Nearby, he pointed to a
pêche de vigne
tree, a late-ripening peach, on a neighboring plot. Griffault told us that these peaches were traditionally planted among the grapevines as snacks for grape pickers during harvest.

For a Parisian-born Frenchman, Griffault's sense of international culinary adventure was also impressive. He pulled a long, white two-pound daikon radish (the kind that gets grated into strings and piled on sushi plates in Japanese restaurants), wiped the sticky clay from it, and handed it to Jesse, who really didn't know what to make of it. He also had shiso, a spicy, floral Japanese basil, growing on his plot.

Some plots were like a United Nations of herbs, fruits, flowers, and vegetables. An Antillean gardener had a chayote squash vine. Another had a stand of giant cabbage on remarkably long stocks. We spotted a pumpkin, too, definitely a nontraditional French food. And very late-bearing strawberries—it was the first weekend of October.

“Nipple of Venus!” Griffault shouted naughtily as we approached a tomato plant with purplish-red tomatoes and slightly pointed tips. “It's a new one we're trying this year.” At this point, we were clearly pillaging from other gardeners’ plots. “Don't worry, I'm allowed,” he reassured us, waving his cigarette-holding hand over his head. As we walked, he picked whatever was ripe and handed it to Jesse, who was happily filling her cloth market bag.

After an hour, we knew which arrondissement he had been born in, that he had a girlfriend nearby, that he was crazy about herbs, and that he was most proud of his compost system and worm bin. Sure enough, as we rounded the garden's toolshed and neatly labeled compost bins, he lifted a strip of burlap inside a long wooden trough, and there were thousands of red wigglers waiting for their next meal of kitchen peelings and compost.

Worried that we'd outstayed our welcome, we thanked Monsieur Griffault for his time—and for our bulging market bag of free produce. Then he invited us to the annual community garden picnic, right there in the garden, the following day. As we walked away, arms straining from the weight of our free Paris-grown urban produce, Jill remarked on the impromptu guided tour, the exchange of e-mail addresses, the gifts of food, the open invitation for a return visit anytime, and the general
bonhomie
of it all. “Happens all the time,” I told her. “Whenever little green food plants are involved.”

T
HE
K
ING'S
V
EGETABLE
G
ARDEN
, V
ERSAILLES

Unfortunately, we couldn't attend Monsieur Griffault's community garden picnic because Jill, Jesse, and I were making our way to Versailles. While the
maraîchers
of central Paris have mostly faded into history, a particularly beautiful example of walled gardening and intensive urban agricultural techniques can still be experienced at the
potager du Roi
, or the King's Vegetable Garden, in this wealthy suburb of the capital, just a few blocks away from the Palace of Versailles.

When Louis XIV, the Sun King, moved his court from Paris to Versailles in the last half of the seventeenth century, a twenty-five-acre (nine-hectare) vegetable and fruit garden was built to supply his kitchen and his lavish parties. No expense was spared. Jean-Baptiste La Quintinie, a former lawyer turned garden designer as well as a highly skilled gardener and orchardist, was in charge of building this garden beginning in 1678. La Quintinie would be the site's head gardener until he died in 1688, and the
potager du Roi
would be his masterpiece.

The site had its challenges. First, a large swamp was drained and dried out. Soil was brought in and stone and masonry walls and terraces were built. The result was a large rectangular central vegetable garden made up of sixteen smaller squares surrounding a large fountain and pond right in the middle. Twenty-nine walled orchards were built around the perimeter. These sunken gardens with high, thick stone walls created microclimates and sheltered areas that allowed fruit to ripen early; even fig trees within this walled, well-tended garden could survive in the central European climate. Louis XIV was said to be fanatical about figs.

Using methods he had learned from
maraîchers
, such as heavy applications of fresh manure from the royal stables, making the most of angles of exposure to the sun, and building thick walls around orchards, La Quintinie was able to ripen fruit five and even six weeks ahead of schedule. Apparently, his gardens yielded strawberries by the end of
March, peas in April, and figs in June. He would even get asparagus and lettuce crops in December.

Despite the drastic reductions in operating funds under King Louis XV, La Quintinie's successors managed to introduce new growing techniques. Twelve coffee plants were eventually acclimatized in the garden's greenhouses, and Louis XV would proudly boast of his coffee grown right at Versailles. The introduction of heated greenhouses yielded even more exotics, most notably the eight hundred pineapple plants growing there when the French Revolution took place.

The garden survived the political and social changes brought on by the revolution and two world wars. The garden's custodians managed in one way or another to continuously produce food, and it now remains largely as it was built over 330 years ago. The
potager du Roi
was listed as a historic site in 1926 and remains one of the few palace gardens left in Europe.

I exchanged a few brief e-mails with Antoine Jacobsohn, the
responsable du service Potager du Roi, Ecole nationale supérieure du paysage à Versailles
—essentially, the head gardener at the King's Vegetable Garden at the National School for Landscape Architecture at Versailles. Jacobsohn, who was born in New Jersey but who has lived in France since the mid-1980s, is equally comfortable with English and French. The garden, he told me, was open to the public Tuesdays through Sundays, from April to the end of October, but on the very weekend that I was in Paris, the annual harvest festival,
Saveurs du Potager
—Tastes from the Vegetable Garden—was going to be held.

After a five-minute walk from the main train stop in Versailles, Jill, Jesse, and I each paid our €4.50 (roughly $6.50) entrance fees.

We had arranged to meet Jacobsohn beside the statue of La Quintinie on the terrace looking out over the central square, which included four hundred different vegetable varieties and five thousand fruit trees (about four hundred varieties). Though little has changed since Louis XIV stood on this same terrace to revel in the splendor of his garden, Jacobsohn immediately clarified that this was
not
a museum garden but very much a working food-producing space, with little time or room for sentimentality.

Varieties don't get to stay in the garden for historic record; they remain if they produce desirable fruit or vegetables that taste good or are interesting in some sort of way for educational or research purposes. If a new cultivar or variety tastes or produces better, Jacobsohn lets the laws of natural selection take effect. “Just because it's old, doesn't mean it's good,” Jacobsohn said.
⁸

This is also a teaching garden. “I'm a gardener of gardeners,” Jacobsohn joked. It's his job to “grow” gardeners, since the garden functions chiefly through funding from the Department of Agriculture in exchange for the educational programs for the 160 landscape architecture students who cycle through the garden. Shockingly, the garden operates on a meager budget of €40,000 annually. “This is a 9.4 hectare
site—about twenty-two acres, operating with ten permanent gardeners,” Jacobsohn informed us, as he raised his dark, unruly eyebrows. “We're an extremely prestigious space, and we're also an extremely poor space.”

Produce from the King's Garden—forty tons of fruit and twenty-five tons of vegetables annually—is for sale at the weekly farmers’ market in the cathedral square across from the garden's entrance, as well as in the retail shop inside the garden. There's also a small income from the entrance fee to the garden. “We try to make up for [lack of money] through passion and good organization,” laughed Jacobsohn, who was then pressed back into official duty to lead another public tour of the garden on this very busy, crisp fall afternoon.

Left to meander on our own through the various outdoor “rooms” in this enormous garden, we were particularly taken with the orchards. Surrounded by the largest collection of espaliered fruit trees in the world, I marveled at the strange and inventive pruning techniques on display. Espaliered trees (or plants) are those that are pruned specifically into flat, two-dimensional planes, often against a wall or in formal patterns. It's a practice that goes back to at least the Middle Ages and was popular for fruit trees so that they could grow flat against a stone wall and benefit from the maximum amount of heat radiating from the wall, so that the fruit could ripen faster. There are other forms of espaliered trees that are not two-dimensional but are still intended to let as much sunlight hit the fruit as possible, such as the
Doyenné du Comice
pear tree, which was being grown in the shape of a vase on a cylindrical cage for support.

The apple trees had already been picked, but the pear trees were heavy with beautiful, smooth-skinned pears, with provocative varietal names like
Cuisse-Madame
, which translates to “a thigh of a woman,” or the more pious
Bon-Chrétien
(“Good Christian”)—allegedly the favorite pear variety of La Quintinie himself, and known as William's pear in the United Kingdom, and as Bartlett pear in North America. We found a ripe pear, of undetermined nomenclature, within arm's reach, so I discreetly picked it as a treat for the train ride back to Paris.

In penance, I bought several books at the retail shop, a souvenir kitchen apron for a friend, and an 8-ounce (250-gram) jar of
Potager du Roi
syrupy golden estate honey, from the summer 2010 flow, to add to my ever-expanding collection of urban honey.

P
ARIS'S
U
RBAN
V
INEYARDS

Paris's urban vineyards, which up until the eighteenth century covered vast areas of the city, have withstood the onslaught of urbanization better than the market gardens. There are currently 132 urban and periurban vineyards in the greater Paris region, and ten inside the city limits.
⁹
Some are comprised of new plantings, less than two decades old, others date back to the 1930s. All but one are co-ops or municipal plantings that mark major historic vineyard sites in the capital. Le Domaine de la Ville de Paris-Bagatelle, which borders the Bois de Boulogne, is the one private commercial vineyard inside Paris.

Parc Georges-Brassens, just east of the Eiffel Tower, is a vineyard of seven hundred Pinot Noir vines planted in 1983. It's on a site that once held a major vineyard covering the entire south hamlet of Vaugirard up until the end of the eighteenth century. Perlette and Pinot Meunier grapes were added after 1983, as were some Chasselas de Fontainebleau table grapes. Depending on the year, this urban vineyard yields up to 1,300 pounds (600 kilograms) of grapes from a 1,300-square-foot (1,200-square-meter) footprint.
¹⁰

In the thirteenth century, monks tended a thirty-seven-acre (fifteen-hectare) vineyard in east Paris, some of which is in part now Parc de Belleville in the Twentieth Arrondissement. It was reestablished in 1992 as the 2,700-square-foot (250-square meter) vineyard at the Parc de Belleville. It contains 140 vines, some Pinot Meunier and some Chardonnay.
¹¹

The Vigne du Parc de Bercy, on the Quai de Bercy in the Twelfth Arrondissement, lies along the Seine River. Wine grapes were thought to
have been planted here over two millennia ago when the Romans conquered Gaul and named the settlement Lutecia (it was renamed Paris in the third century CE). By the thirteenth century, Paris had a major vineyard and winery on this site, and Louis XIV had established a wine warehousing enterprise at Bercy, which flourished until the 1950s. In 1996, a total of 350 Sauvignon and Chardonnay vines were replanted, as well as a number of historic table grapes.
¹²