PA 750

The Mur à Pêches in Bagnolet holds a unique place in the landscape. It consists of high, parallel stone walls built in the seventeenth century to grow peaches for the French royal court. By storing the sun's heat in the masonry, the walls allowed delicate fruit to ripen in the colder climate near Paris. Today, these crumbling, fruit-laden partitions stretch across hectares, surviving as a tangle of overgrown gardens and abandoned masonry where the city has grown up around them.