Parc du Contades

This guide to Parc du Contades in Strasbourg follows a promenade planted twice. Marshal Louis Georges Erasme de Contades laid it out in 1764 on an old militia range, lining it with young lindens that barely had time to mature. You'll hear why revolutionary France ordered them felled in 1793, and how the city replanted in 1799 with planes, chestnuts and more lindens. Along the way it visits an eccentric nineteenth-century pleasure garden with a fake Apollo temple, a pyramid and, by some accounts, a live bear.