Greenhouses of the École Du Breuil (hot houses of the school garden)

In March 1867 an order of Prefect Haussmann created a school of horticulture and arboriculture to supply gardeners to Paris and the Seine department; Alphonse Du Breuil and Jean Darcel were its first directors. The school was first set up at Saint-Mandé.

The 1931 Colonial Exhibition and the building of the Musée des Colonies took part of its land. In 1936 the school moved to the site of the former Faisanderie farm in the south-east of the wood and took the name École Du Breuil. Its collections were resumed in 1937, halted at the outbreak of war and restarted in 1942-1943. In 2017 the school marked its 150th anniversary with open days.

Long reserved for students, the estate partly opened to the public from May 2013: five hectares of gardens have been accessible daily since then, and the grounds carry the "Jardin remarquable" and "ÉcoJardin" labels. The greenhouses, which belong to the teaching zone, stayed closed longer; according to French Wikipedia they have received visitors on Wednesday afternoons since 1 February 2023, a weekly opening the school's website confirms.

The school's website describes its greenhouses as a "group of chapelles", the French term for several glazed spans built side by side, bringing together under glass plants with opposite needs: tropical species on one hand, plants from desert and Mediterranean regions on the other. The City of Paris lists them among the school garden's "hot houses".

The cadastral plan, as used by OpenStreetMap, shows two greenhouse buildings on the estate, the main one with an indented outline; the same survey classes the plot as glasshouse horticulture. The group is marked among the non-public zones on the official map, and the Wednesday visits reach it from the public garden.

According to the garden's official map, the greenhouses hold both tropical plants and plants from desert and Mediterranean regions. They also serve the school as production houses: at the 2017 open days, students sold cacti and plants raised on the estate, including seasonal bedding, vegetables and greenhouse plants.

The garden also keeps a seasonal collection, about a thousand labelled plants, ten of which are selected each year for the City of Paris's own plantings; in summer the garden shows more than a thousand varieties of flowering and foliage plants. Around the greenhouses the estate lines up a rock garden of about 800 m² with more than a thousand species, a fruticetum of several hundred shrubs, a systematic collection of perennials, 80 taxa of climbing plants and a bamboo collection, a trained orchard of more than a hundred apple and pear varieties, a walled kitchen garden and a market orchard planted in 2019. The neighbouring arboretum, on 13 hectares, holds about 800 species of broadleaf trees and conifers.

The public entrance is on the Route de la Pyramide, opposite the Arboretum de Paris, one of the four sites of the Jardin botanique de Paris. The greenhouses can be visited on Wednesday afternoons only, from the public garden side; for the rest of the week the walk is limited to the five open hectares, which take one to two hours: a 1930s rose garden with pergola and carp pond, the rock garden, the English garden and its pond, the Mediterranean garden and the perennial borders.

The big events open more of the estate: the school fête in May, the Heritage Days and the Fête des jardins in September, the Rendez-vous aux jardins, with free guided tours. The Grande Serre of the Parc zoologique de Paris is about 3.5 km away.