By Anne Swardson

Paris is in what is called the “red zone.” That is, its parks cannot yet open for fear of sparking a return of the coronavirus. An unexpected by-product of these post-lockdown days of garden neglect is that the city is bursting out in uncontrolled green.

In parks and along streets, the grass is unmowed, the flowers are unattended, the trees are unpruned. Usually, this park near me is beautifully maintained. I’ve walked through it many times and seen teams of workers on their knees, digging out one set of flowers and planting another, or fertilizing, or trimming the bushes.

Here’s a photo I took of the same park entrance about a month ago, a couple of weeks into the lockdown.

This is both disturbing and refreshing. France is a champion at controlling nature. Think Versailles, where the bushes around the palace are shaved into geometrical perfection. The current garden disarray is jarring in a city where services have mostly worked well during the pandemic. If the parks aren’t being tended to, is trash pickup going to be the next to disappear?

In fact, the pandemic itself challenges the notion that nature can be managed. Nothing can be controlled. Not the virus, not the grass. The phaseout of the lockdown embodies this. People have more freedom to move about than they did before, and the hope is they will exercise protective measures sufficient to prevent a huge surge of new cases. I’ll have a report on that in The American Scholar on May 21.

In the meantime, we still get to see topiary. It’s just growing naturally, on streetlamps.

It’s rather nice to see nature following her own path, especially since the weather has been heartbreakingly perfect. In some places, the new growth is positively pastoral, as in this photo from the Parc Monceau.

Elsewhere, less so.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo is arguing strenuously for the parks to reopen, though Health Minister Olivier Véran says it’s not yet safe. Either way, the untamed greenery won’t be around indefinitely. These workers will no doubt be followed by others.