Author: Zahid Sardar
Photographer: Marion Brenner
Format: Hardback
Publisher: Gibbs Smith

When French Queen Catherine de Medici had the Tuileries Palace and Garden outside of Paris' Medieval walls built beginning in 1564, she began the unprecedented expansion and greening of the city. The French Revolution, notes the author, "stopped such horticultural and arboreal extravagance in its tracks,""?(R)?before resurfacing in 1853 when Haussmann began reconfiguring the city into 20 arrondissements, building wide avenues and began refurbishing old estates, parks and creating large forested ones like the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes.

Among the great gardens featured in In & Out of Paris features are Vaux-le-Vicomte, Versailles, and Courances, all classic André Le Nôtre–style French gardens. This pictorial review not only shows those magnificent gardens beautiful photographed, but also relates interesting details behind those designs. (Please see "A Little Chaos", a soon to be released movie about Le Nôtre and fellow landscape architect (paysagist) Sabine de Barra during their Versailles design work, and their romance "?(R)? oh, là là.)

But the book is not just about Le Nôtre. There are 40 gardens between the covers, including Paris gardens of contemporary artist Jean-Michel Othoniel, Pierre Bergé, co-founder of the Yves Saint Laurent Couture House, 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 Champs élysées garden for eccentric multimillionaire art collector Charles de Beistegui (1895–1970).

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.

Author Zahid Sardar is a San Francisco–based editor, writer, and curator specializing in architecture, interiors, and design. 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.