Featuring 40 parks, squares and woodlands, posh and plain, both in Paris and surrounds, Cahill's illustrated guide will lead you off the beaten track to areas of Paris you might not otherwise encounter.

The spectacular transformation of Paris during the 19th century into a city of tree-lined boulevards and public parks both redesigned the capital and inspired the era’s great Impressionist artists. The renewed landscape gave crowded, displaced urban dwellers green spaces to enjoy, while suburbanites and country-dwellers began cultivating their own flower gardens. As public engagement with gardening grew, artists increasingly featured flowers and parks in their work. Public Parks, Private Gardens includes masterworks by artists such as Bonnard, Cassatt, Cézanne, Corot, Daumier, Van Gogh, Manet, Matisse, Monet, and Seurat. Many of these artists were themselves avid gardeners, and they painted parks and gardens as the distinctive scenery of contemporary life. Writing from the perspective of both a distinguished art historian and a trained landscape designer, Colta Ives provides new insights not only into these essential works, but also into this extraordinarily creative period in France’s history.

For over 350 years Parisians have designed and preserved phenomenal public outdoor spaces. In this book Jacqueline Widmar Stewart follows the fine-spun threads of the parklands tapestry in greater Paris. Identification of various hallmarks of premiere park-building eras imbues individual parks with multi-dimensional qualities and allows readers to experience these grand green places in the way Parisians do. Multiple layers of elements and themes are woven into the fabric of French parks. Reaching back as far as its Roman heritage, vestiges of the history of Paris are apparent in virtually all its parks, regardless of size. Even the balanced distribution of green spaces throughout the city reflects a major 19th-century city-planning epoch and is still carried forward in current park development. A number of French parks and gardens from the 17th century initially belonged to royal estates but now welcome public visits -- it should be noted that the Tuileries first opened its gates to the public in 1667. Thoughtfully designed and meticulously tailored to needs of the time, others have covered unsightly urban blight with splendor, and have converted industrial sites to recreational usage while maintaining cultural ties with the past. Many marvels beckon all who enter Paris' magical spheres: a several-kilometer-long landscaped promenade above busy streets; a modern garden suspended above a major train station; the Parc de la Villette with its grand red architectural curiosities of form and motion; a midisland allée in the Seine; newly created marshlands now home to mallard ducklings; clouds of fragrance from rose-descendants of Josephine Bonaparte's original collection; not one, but two gardens of the quintessential sculptor, Auguste Rodin.

Michael Kolster renders Paris's parks like no one since photographer Eugène Atget a century ago.

Among the more than 30 great and small projects within In & Out of Paris are Vaux-le-Vicomte, Versailles, and Courances—all classic André Le Nôtre–style French gardens. Also discover the Paris gardens of celebrated artist Jean-Michel Othoniel and art aficionado Pierre Bergé, architect Kenzo Takada’s Japanese retreat in the Bastille, Australian couturier Martin Grant’s tiny terrace in the Marais, Mexican painter MariCarmen Hernandez’s Montmartre rooftop, and American architect Michael Herrman’s homage to Le Corbusier’s surreal ChampsÉlysées garden for bon vivant Charles de Beistegui. Modern masters Louis Benech, Gilles Clement, Pascal Cribier, Christian Fournet, Camille Muller, Hugues Peuvergne, and Pierre-Alexandre Risser are also featured, representing a new era of experiments, color, and asymmetry in the Paris garden. ZAHID SARDAR is a San Francisco–based editor, writer, and curator specializing in architecture, interiors, and design. His work has appeared in Dwell, Interiors, Western Interiors & Design, Interior Design, House & Garden, Elle Décor, House Beautiful, and Landscape Architecture. He has taught design history at the California College of the Arts and has written several other books, including West Coast Modern and New Garden Design.

“Get ready for a beauty overload. It’s food for the soul, it’s a book of dreams and details, of flowers so perfect you want to hug them to you.” —Carla Coulson, author of Paris Tango Paris—City of Love, City of Light, City of Flowers. From elegant floral boutiques to lively flower markets to glorious blooming trees and expansive public gardens, flowers are the essential ingredient to the lush sensory bouquet that is Parisian life. With beautiful photography, Paris in Bloom transports readers on a stunning floral tour of the city, and provides recommendations to the best flower markets and a detailed guide to spring blooms. Timeless in content, Paris in Bloom is a book for Paris lovers to savor again and again, one to keep on the nightstand to conjure fond memories of their first visit and inspire dreams of the next. “Brilliantly captures the splendor of French fleurs with lush photographs and elegant prose . . . A masterpiece!” —Laura Dowling, former chief floral designer at the White House “I don’t know how Georgianna does it. She manages to make Paris, already the most beautiful city in the world, appear even more charming, more elegant and more beautiful than it already is . . . Paris in Bloom is filled with a veritable carpet of pinks and whites, pastels and green portraits that make me let out an audible sigh of joy. This book can re-inspire you to believe that yes, life really is quite beautiful.” —Doni Belau, author of Paris Cocktails “Destined to become a classic of its type, Paris in Bloom is Georgianna Lane’s love letter to Paris and to flowers.”—Gray Levett, editor of Nikon Owner magazine

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