The Luxembourg Fruit Garden

The fruit varieties come from the Luxembourg Garden fruit collection, which dates back to the 17th century. It was in around 1650 that the orchard was born, when an inhabitant of Vitry in the Val-de-Marne retired under the name of Brother Alexis to the Carthusian monastery in Paris, which was next door to the Luxembourg Palace at that time. Thanks to this man's talent, the reputation of the Carthusian monastery's fruit tree nursery gradually grew, along with its production: by 1712, more than 14,000 fruit trees were produced each year on the estate.

In the following century, the congregation's many branches in Europe enabled it to obtain the best species and varieties of fruit, and so create the most valuable collection of fruit trees in the world, both native and acclimatised.

But on 2 November 1789, the National Assembly put an end to the splendour of the Carthusian monks' nursery once and for all by decreeing the nationalisation of the clergy's property. Little by little, the nursery ran out of plants and was on the point of disappearing. It only owed its salvation to Jean Chaptal, Napoleon I's Minister of the Interior, who was responsible for agriculture at the time. Aware of the need to safeguard this unique plant heritage, he ordered the fruit collection to be relocated to the same site as that occupied by the Carthusian monks.

In 1866, the creation of Rue Auguste Comte gave the Luxembourg Garden and its fruit garden their definitive boundaries.

Today, the collection comprises just over 1,000 trees in an area of 2,100 m², and includes 379 varieties of apple and 247 varieties of pear. In 1991, the fruit garden was officially recognised as a "conservatory orchard" by the French Association for the Conservation of Plant Species (A.F.C.E.V.) and is dedicated to rebuilding the Carthusian fruit collection. The latter has been awarded the "national collection" label by the Conservatoire des collections végétales spécialisées (C.C.V.S.).

The fruit garden is also used as material for the courses given each year by the École d'Horticulture du Jardin du Luxembourg.

The history of the fruit garden in the Luxembourg Garden began in around 1650, when a resident of Vitry decided to withdraw from the world to live with the Carthusian monks, who had been settled south of Paris for four centuries by Saint Louis.

At the time, Vitry was one of the very few places where the art of training and breeding fruit trees was practised. The various trees were grown in the woods, from shoots and spontaneous germination of seeds. Olivier de Serres was the first to discuss the art of breeding trees in a nursery in his work "Le Théâtre d'Agriculture", published in 1600.

The Carthusian monks soon commissioned Brother Alexis to grow young fruit trees on their forty-hectare estate, first for their own use and then for sale. Thanks to his talent, the reputation of the Carthusian nursery grew along with its production. By 1712, more than 14,000 fruit trees were produced each year on the estate. Brother François and Brother Philippe succeeded him, perpetuating the nursery's reputation.

On the death of Brother Philippe in 1750, none of the monks was capable of taking over and so the Carthusians decided to call in a renowned arboriculturist of great skill, Christophe Hervy. He was to run the Carthusian nursery for 46 years and build it a European reputation.

Thanks to the congregation's many European branches, Hervy was able to source the best species and varieties of fruit, creating the most valuable collection of native and acclimatised fruit trees in the world during the second half of the 18th century. Although the price of the trees was higher than elsewhere, almost all the produce was sold, usually in the summer.

Production was not sufficient some years, and so Hervy would recommend trees from other nurseries, as a mark of confidence and a favour for the nurseryman. For several years (1752, 1767, 1768, 1786, etc.), Hervy published the Catalogue des Pépinières des Chartreux, a booklet of a few pages listing the varieties grown by the Carthusian monks. Unfortunately, the Conservation of the Luxembourg Gardens no longer has any trace of them today. His son, Michel Christophe, continued and perfected the knowledge he had acquired.

However, the French Revolution brought the work begun 140 years earlier to a sudden halt. On 2 November 1789, the National Assembly put an end once and for all to the splendour of the Carthusian monks' nursery by decreeing the nationalisation of the clergy's property. The following year, the commune of Paris acquired the Carthusian estate from the State and a large proportion of the trees in the nursery were sold. With nothing to replace them, the nursery ran out of trees.

Aware of the disaster, the Thouin brothers got Hervy to hand over two trees of each genus, species and variety to the Jardin des Plantes. In the winter of 1795, Hervy and son were ordered to move the rest of the nursery to the former royal estate at Sceaux. It had been reduced to 18,000 trees from millions a few years earlier.

With the nursery completely destroyed and the collections badly damaged, the story could have ended there were it not for Jean Chaptal, an enlightened protector of the arts and sciences at the Ministry of the Interior. The minister wanted to show the whole of Europe the value of French agriculture and asked that the fruit collection be reinstalled on the very site that the Carthusian monks had occupied. But the land on which they had raised their trees no longer existed and the vast enclosure had been divided up by joining part of it to the Luxembourg Garden, laying out streets (the southern part of the current Boulevard St Michel and the current Rue d'Assas), and building the Avenue de l'Observatoire with its length of 665 m and width of 40 m. What remained of the site was occupied by a cloister, houses and, above all, ruins. How, in the midst of this rubble and under the flowerbeds of the Luxembourg Garden, could a nursery be planted that would be both useful and a source of pleasure? Chaptal did not hesitate and huge earthworks were undertaken under the direction of the younger Hervy, who was appointed director of the Carthusian National Nursery. The stones extracted from the site were sold to cover part of the cost, the ground levelled and then covered with topsoil. During the winter of 1801-02, the trees were planted, separating the land into two parts: the trees returned from Sceaux (a single individual of each species or variety to reconstitute the collection) and the nursery proper, with espaliers of peach trees, pyramids of pear trees, a collection of plum and cherry trees and a number of apple and pear seedlings.

By 1804, the popular Carthusian National Nursery offered 80,000 trees: quince, crab apple, doucin and paradis apple, almond, cherry and plum. Nursery. The beginnings of a horticultural school were established: the nursery was open to visitors and anyone else who wished to attend. Prefects could send students to learn the art of training and growing trees. In the spring of 1809, the new Minister of the Interior, Champmol, a Count of the Empire, authorised Hervy to open a free practical course in the cultivation of fruit trees. The school survived the wars and changes of regime almost uninterruptedly, and still attracts around 250 enthusiastic students every year.

Chaptal also wanted to bring together in this nursery all the species and varieties of vines grown in France so that a list could be drawn up of the different known grapes. To make this happen, he enlisted the help of all the prefects of France, who were tasked with collecting existing grape varieties in each département. The result was the finest collection of vines that had ever existed.

In 1842, thanks to the efforts of Jules-Alexandre Hardy, Head Gardener at the Luxembourg Garden, the École des Vignes had as many as 1,498 different species or varieties, and by 1848 this number had risen to 1,924. An undated catalogue, attributed to Hardy in the mid-19th century and recently found in the Senate archives, lists 797 varieties. Unfortunately, the collection disappeared in the 1860s, during the works caried out in this part of Paris under Napoleon III, and was never reconstituted.

The nursery was to experience more difficult times. Although it had been assigned to the Upper House since a royal decree in June 1814, along with the Luxembourg Palace and its outbuildings, it was still managed by the Ministry of the Interior. The House of Peers deemed it useless and decided to stop allocating it a budget. In 1828, the production of trees was discontinued for lack of funds. After being passed back and forth between various government departments, it finally fell to the Ministry of Public Education, which split it in two. The eastern part of the land was given to the Paris Faculty of Medicine to create a botanical garden of medicinal plants. The western part was made available to the Natural History Museum, which kept it for ten years but eventually refused it due to a lack of funds to cultivate it. In August 1848, the few remaining areas of the Grande Pépinière still under the control of the Senate were transformed into gardens and opened to the public. In 1866, the creation of Rue Auguste Comte, as part of the Hausmann works, gave the Luxembourg Gardens and what is now the fruit garden their current boundaries. The City of Paris redesigned the land one last time, at its own expense and on behalf of the Senate, giving this part of the garden the "English" landscape style that was very much in vogue at the time.

Barillet Deschamps, who worked for Alphand, was responsible for the layout and planting that can be seen today. Under the direction of Head Gardener Auguste Rivière, a new fruit garden was laid out along Rue Auguste Comte. The arable soil needed for this garden was brought from Châtillon, a commune close to Paris, and from then on the Luxembourg fruit garden was to become a conservatory orchard for fruit species, mainly apples and pears, where nursery activity in the strict sense of the word would never again have its place.

Since the beginning of the century, the curators have been looking for visual and practical materials for their courses, while maintaining the collection. Numerous fruit species have been added to the collection, including cherry and plum trees, some of which were free-standing with a high stem. This approach was strengthened in the 1950s, when the fruit garden became a model for what amateurs could achieve at home to live in "fruit self-sufficiency". At that time, the focus was clearly on maximum productivity, seeking yields of class I varieties (of commercial interest) for sale, sometimes to the detriment of the collection, but above all to the detriment of species diversity.

In the mid-1970s, following a decline in the collection, the policy was reversed as awareness grew of this impoverishment of the varietal heritage. A large number of graft exchanges took place between the Garden and numerous associations throughout France and even abroad. In the mid-1990s, the apple and pear collection took centre stage, although other species were kept for courses (some "new" species were even introduced, such as actinidias and persimmons), while they also tried to reconstitute the Carthusian collection.

In 1991, the orchard was recognised as a conservatory orchard by the Association Française pour la Conservation des Espèces Végétales (French Association for the Conservation of Plant Species). Conservation of varieties but also of forms ranging from the simplest (single or double U, trident, Chauffour grill, candelabra) to all the goblet forms whether free, trellised or attached; but also all the palmettes such as Verrier, rabattues, Legendre, à la diable, Ferraguti, Baldassari, obliques; lozenges, tricroisillons, Marchand flag, spinning tops, cattails, columns, spindelbusch or even more sophisticated shapes such as tiered or winged pyramids and open-book goblets.

Where does the fruit go? The fruit harvested each year goes to the pomology exhibitions in which the Senate participates and is distributed to a humanitarian association in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, the Soupe Populaire.

The 1804 catalogue of the École Impériale du Luxembourg, drawn up by Michel-Christophe Hervy, gives us an idea of the extreme diversity of fruit species and varieties gathered in the nursery at that time: fig trees (10 varieties), mulberry trees (3 varieties), brambles (4 varieties), raspberry trees (8 varieties), fruit roses (2 varieties), arbutus trees (2 varieties), currant bushes (20 varieties), barberry bushes (7 varieties), Plum trees (3 varieties), Dogwood trees (3 varieties), Almond trees (16 varieties), Apricot trees (15 varieties), Cherry trees (46 varieties), Plum trees (68 varieties), Apple trees (87 varieties), Cider apple trees (32 varieties), pear trees (137 varieties), compote pear trees (14 varieties), perry pear trees (38 varieties), quince trees (3 varieties), corm trees (1 variety), wild cherry trees (1 variety), medlar trees (4 varieties), beech trees (1 variety), walnut trees (13 varieties), hazelnut trees (8 varieties), pine trees (2 varieties), peach trees (39 varieties), nectarines (5 varieties), nectarines (1 variety), vines (135 black seeded varieties and 36 white seeded varieties).

The most famous fruit tree in the Luxembourg Garden was undoubtedly the large spiral and large palmette 'Louise Bonne d'Avranches' planted in 1867 and 1869 by Auguste Rivière. Grafted onto rootstock of the same species, these trees produced an average of 100 kg of fruit per year and took around 50 years to grow. The large palmette formed an immense rectangular shape measuring 5m20 long by 5 m high. The total length of its 19 supporting branches was 96 metres, while the two branches forming the outer envelope of the palmette alone measured 14.80 metres. Fruit production was very abundant: in 1917, more than 1,000 fruits weighing 100g each were harvested. Its frame was felled in 1978, but is now preserved and presented to the public in the orangery during the Luxembourg Garden's autumn exhibition. The same fate befell the large spiral, which died in 1979.