Somewhere That's Green

On the rooftops of Paris, one landscape architect offers a new vision of a city garden.

- Kurt Soller

Staring out over the banister from the rooftop terrace of an eighth-floor penthouse on the Marais’s Rue Vieille du Temple, it’s immediately clear you’re in Paris: Across the park below, past the mansard roofs of the low Haussmannian buildings that have fronted these streets since the late 19th century, the Eiffel Tower and the Place de la Bastille’s column pierce the grey clouds in the middle distance and, looking west, the cyan blue and cherry-red tubes of the Centre Pompidou dominate the skyline, their chromatic hues clashing against the beige city.

These are pleasant, familiar views — but if you turn back towards the private terrace’s adjoined apartment (which is owned by a television producer), you’ll spot the roof’s true focal point: a dense thicket of plants, grounded in weathered terracotta pots, layered with such variety and quantity as to completely shroud the walls and corners of this 754-square-foot deck. The verdant, V-shaped tableau, as absorbing as it is disorienting in this metropolitan context, evokes the fantasy of being a parched desert traveller stumbling across a fecund oasis. This sense of sudden displacement is further echoed by the plants themselves, nearly none of which technically belong in Paris: Among the dozens of varieties, there’s Agave x nigra, a hardy desert succulent; Phillyrea angustifolia, a silvery-leafed bush native to the Mediterranean region; and Aristaloe aristata, squat and spiky, which hails from South Africa.