Searching for autumn in the city

Autumn came late to Paris this year. After a summer of rain and cold, September and October were two months of warm, sunny days. On November 1st, All Saints Day, a holiday in France, families picnicked outside and sunbathers peeled off jackets to bask in the light of a generous mid-autumn sun. Leaves on the trees remained mostly green, with here and there a splash of pale yellow. Autumn, the season of crisp air, crisp Macintosh apples, and hillsides aflame with color (my memories of the season in Schuylkill County), was nowhere in sight.

By mid-November things had changed. Temperatures dropped, gray skies returned, and rain washed away the dusty remains of summer so that autumn could finally settle in. Keeping up a family tradition—in the fall, with my mother and aunt, I often took a Sunday afternoon walk along the western slope of Sharp Mountain or in the woods behind our home—I set out to search for autumn in what I consider my “backyard,” the neighborhood where I live.

In Schuylkill County, autumn is easy to find. Most towns are nestled in valleys or gaps between the ridges of the Blue Mountain chain of the Appalachians. Lifting their eyes to the hills, residents can take in a riot of fall color. In the surrounding countryside, dry corn stalks rattle in the wind, and backyards are carpeted with fallen leaves that need to be raked.

In Paris, I lift my eyes to a gray sky and lower them (remember, I’m on the sixth floor) to macadam and gray façades, cars and busses. Craning my neck, further up the street, I can see a few chestnut trees whose leaves turn from green to brown and then fall. The next step is for municipal workers to blast them off sidewalks with leaf blowers while blasting the ears of anyone within a 100-foot radius.

The view from my living room window is not promising, but my “backyard” is full of surprises, proof that autumn in the city has splendors all its own. For example, in Belleville Park, at La Maison de l’air, “the House of Air,” a modern structure with a glass façade, where visitors can learn about atmospheric conditions in Paris, I meet Agnès Joly, an agricultural engineer. To explain her work to us, she takes time off from tending her aquaponic garden, a long row of above-ground edible plants fertilized by dozens of gold fish swimming in a pool at the garden’s base.

Founder of Joly Mer (mer=sea), Agnès has been chosen by the city of Paris to develop aquaponic gardening as part of a plan to promote urban farming and innovative green spaces. In her above-ground garden, Agnès is tending three separate plant beds, each devoted to a different form or urban gardening, all thriving without soil. In a modular unit holding several small pots, kale, chives and basil take root among clay pebbles receiving a balanced flow of oxygen, nutrients and water. In one unit, plants receive mineral fertilizers (hydroponics), in another, organic (bioponics), and in the third (aquaponics), the fish provide the nourishment the plants need.

Using less water than traditional agriculture, with no need of soil, above-ground gardens of this type can be installed almost anywhere, even in a city apartment, and the ultimate goal, as in traditional truck gardens, is to give city dwellers access to fresh, locally grown produce. And that is Agnès Joly’s plan: to sell her fresh greens and herbs to Parisian restaurants, proving that aquaponics is a viable economic and ecological model of urban farming.

On a crisp autumn day, against a changing Parisian sky, Agnès tends her garden, one moment awash in sunlight, the next, darkened by threatening black clouds. A few steps away, in the same hillside park, the leaves turn red and orange on the vines of one of the city’s oldest vineyards, still producing Chardonnay grapes. Centuries ago, these vineyards belonged to one of the abbeys that farmed the hills above Paris, irrigating their crops with the water of nearby springs.

Wandering through my neighborhood, I come across vestiges of that long-ago time in street names: rue des Cascades (waterfalls), rue de la Mare (pond), or rue Savies, named after an underground spring first mentioned in a document dating back to the 11th century. It is one of many still surging from sources beneath the hill where I live. With fields and vineyards located far from the Seine, the monks understood the value of these springs and watched over them as carefully as they did their crops, building springhouses and stone trenches with descending steps to control the water’s flow.

They called each springhouse a “regard” because it was the place where monks could not only observe the workings of the source but also care for it. In rue des Cascades, a fine specimen still remains, a small building made from cut stone, with a sloped stone roof. Built in the early 17th century, known as “le regard Saint Martin,” it protects Savies spring, which flowed naturally from its source until 1986, when the construction of an apartment building got in the way.

On a recent walk I found the door open and got to step inside. A local historian, holding a gas lantern, showed us the steps along which the spring flows, thick with lime deposits. This is very hard water, neither good for boiling or working up a sudsy lather. For centuries, however, it served agriculture and industry in the section of Paris known as Belleville.

Leaving the “regard” behind, we climb stone steps, crossing a small wood. Somewhere among the trees another springhouse is hidden. In the woods, leaves are falling, some orange, some bright yellow. Not yet five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and already dusk is closing in…

In Paris too, autumn has finally arrived. This is the urban version, where we can come across a micro-farm or a springhouse hundreds of years old. With luck, we may see some bursts of fall color and, above our heads, the expanse of a magnificent autumn sky.