Grandes Serres du Jardin des Plantes

The Jardin des Plantes glasshouses succeed the orangeries of the Royal Garden of Medicinal Plants, founded in 1626. In 1714, after the Peace of Utrecht, the burgomaster of Amsterdam presented Louis XIV with a Coffea arabica plant, and Antoine de Jussieu had the garden's first hothouse built for it; the coffee plants multiplied there before being shipped to Martinique in 1721. Sébastien Vaillant had two more hothouses built in 1714 and 1717, and Buffon another in 1788.

The present buildings begin with Charles Rohault de Fleury, who designed two cast-iron and glass pavilions, the "Mexican" and "Australian" houses, together with curved glasshouses, between 1834 and 1836. Jules André added a winter garden opened in 1889; demolished in 1932-1934, it gave way to René Berger's large glasshouse, opened in 1937, while "colonial glasshouses" went up in the 1930s.

The siege of Paris in 1870 and both world wars cut off fuel to the glasshouses, killing many rare specimens, among them Sophora toromiro brought back from the Pacific in 1936 by Alfred Métraux. The buildings were listed as historic monuments on 24 March 1993. Paul Chemetov rebuilt the curved glasshouses in 1995-1997, and the storm of December 1999 destroyed the colonial houses. From 2005 to 2010 an eight-million-euro project replaced or restored 1,300 m² of glazing and created the Deserts and Arid Environments glasshouse; the complex reopened in 2010 under its present names. Henri Rousseau's "The Snake Charmer" (1907) is linked to these glasshouses.

Rohault de Fleury's two pavilions, each 20 by 12 metres, mark the beginnings of French metal architecture, some fifteen years before Baltard's Halles. Cast iron reduced the internal supports and multiplied the glazed surfaces, and steam heating maintained the warmth needed by tropical plants, then grown in pots and planters.

Jules André's winter garden broke new ground by planting directly in the soil. Its successor, René Berger's glasshouse, covers 750 m²: visitors enter through an Art Deco peristyle whose cylindrical iron-and-glass columns light up, and a 15-metre artificial rock, from which a waterfall feeds a stream, gives a panorama over the vegetation. Adjoining it, the long gallery of the Deserts and Arid Environments glasshouse replaced the wood-and-glass colonial houses in 2010. The curved glasshouses rebuilt by Chemetov are reserved for the gardeners.

The 2005-2010 renovation aimed to restore the buildings' original appearance while modernising how they work. The tropical rainforest house is kept at around 22 °C, and in heatwaves or bad weather the complex may close partly or entirely.

Each glasshouse has a theme. The tropical rainforest house gathers more than 600 plants from Africa, the Americas and South-East Asia, among them cacao, coffee, avocado, banana, pepper and vanilla, as well as Ficus lutea, Chamaedorea geonomiformis, the tree fern Cyathea intermedia and a coconut palm nicknamed "Maeva". The Deserts and Arid Environments house shows plants from the United States, Mexico, the Andes, southern Africa, Madagascar, the Arabian Peninsula, Australia and a few islands, with their answers to drought: living stones, water-storing cacti, globe-shaped silhouettes.

The former Mexican house, which became the New Caledonia glasshouse in 2010, presents a flora that is 76 per cent endemic through five habitats (rainforest, dry forest, mining scrub, savanna and mangrove), including the niaouli and Arthroclianthus. The former Australian house, renamed the History of Plants glasshouse, traces at least 430 million years of evolution by setting fossils and reconstructions beside living representatives of ancient lineages, ferns, conifers and horsetails.

The Grandes Serres stand in the Jardin des Plantes in the 5th arrondissement, served among others by the Gare d'Austerlitz. A single ticket, booked online, covers all four glasshouses, visited in sequence from the rainforest through the deserts and New Caledonia to the history of plants; climbing the rock in the large glasshouse gives a panorama over the vegetation.

In autumn 2026 a broken lift has made the glasshouses temporarily inaccessible to wheelchair users. A recent full-price ticket qualifies for a reduced rate at the other sites of the Jardin des Plantes, the Musée de l'Homme and the Paris Zoological Park, an easy way to extend the day across the rest of the Muséum.