0:04

So I'm here on the outskirts of Paris, standing

0:08

in a garden. But it's not

0:10

just any old garden. This garden is beautiful. This

0:13

garden has plant life from

0:15

all over the world, right

0:17

here in Paris. And

0:19

it's the story of how this diverse

0:22

plant life got here that's a little

0:24

complicated, and it reveals a

0:26

very dark secret. I

0:28

decided while I was here in Paris, I might as well

0:30

visit this garden and see

0:33

its secrets for myself. My

0:46

name is Baudelaire, and this is

0:48

Atlas Obscura, a

0:50

celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and

0:53

wondrous places. Today I'm at

0:55

Le Jardin du Grand Ami Tropical, the Garden

0:57

of Tropical Agronomy. I'm going to take

0:59

a walk through the garden itself, and a walk

1:01

through the complicated history. More,

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after this. At

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U.S. Bank, when we say we're in it

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with you, we mean it. Not just for

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the good stuff, the grand openings and celebrations,

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although those are pretty great, but for all

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the hard work it took to get there.

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The fine-tuning of goals, the managing of cash

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and workflows, and decision-making. We're in to help

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you through all of it, because together, we're

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proving day in and day out that there

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is nothing as powerful as the power of

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us. Visit usbank.com to

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get started today. Equal Housing Lender

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Member FDIC Copyright 2024 U.S. Bank

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As long as you're on vacation, you're

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happy, right? But the truth is...

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cruises. Ships Registry, Malta

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and Ecuador. And

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this place is beautiful when you walk into

2:34

it because you

2:36

just hear birds chirping and

2:39

it's beautiful trees. And there's

2:42

people here, like a handful of people, you

2:44

know, kind of just walking around. And I wonder how many of these

2:47

people know about the history of

2:49

this place. So

2:54

the garden exists within a larger park called

2:57

the Boa de Monson. The park is right

2:59

next to the Chateau de Monson, which was

3:01

home to Napoleon III and some

3:03

of the kings of France. In the late 1890s,

3:06

the College of Agronomy was granted this little

3:08

corner of the park. The plan was to

3:10

bring in cash crops from all across the

3:12

French empire to study and figure out how

3:15

to grow them at scale and turn more

3:17

profit. And so from the start in 1899, it

3:20

was meant to train colonial civil servants.

3:23

That's Dr. Megan Tinsley, a presidential fellow

3:25

at the University of Manchester in England.

3:28

She published an academic article about the garden in

3:30

2019. And so in

3:32

the first few years of its existence, gardens

3:35

were planted, greenhouses were constructed, and

3:37

plants were imported from throughout the

3:39

empire. The idea was

3:41

that these colonial civil servants would figure out

3:44

how to grow these crops at scale and

3:46

would then travel to the French colonies and

3:48

teach the people there what they'd learned. Basically,

3:51

if France's colonial subjects could more efficiently grow

3:53

profitable crops, this of course would benefit the

3:55

French government. But in

3:57

1907, they decided to import

3:59

more.