So I'm here on the outskirts of Paris standing in a garden. But it's not just any old garden. This garden is beautiful. This garden has plant life from all over the world, right here in Paris.

And it's the story of how this diverse plant life got here that's a little complicated and it reveals a very dark secret.

I decided while I was here in Paris I might as well visit this garden and see it secrets for myself. My name is Baudelaire and this is Atlas Obscura. A celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today I'm at La Jardin de Grunamee Tropicale, the Garden of Tropical Agrani.

I'm going to take a walk through the garden itself,

and a walk through the complicated history.

More after this. Oh, And this place is beautiful when you walk into it because you just hear birds chirping and it's beautiful trees and there's people here

like a handful of people you know kind of just walking around and I wonder how many of these

people know about the history of this place.

So the garden exists within a larger park called the Boa de Vincin.

The park is right next to the Ch Bois de Vincin.

The park is right next to the Chateau de Vincin,

which was home to Napoleon III and some of the kings of France.

In the late 1890s, the College of Agronomy

was granted this little corner of the park.

The plan was to bring in cash crops from all across the French Empire to study and figure

out how to grow them at scale and turn more profit.

And so from the start in 1899, it was meant to train colonial civil servants.

That's Dr. Megan Tinsley, a presidential fellow at the University of Manchester in England.

She published an academic article about the

Garden in 2019. And so in the first few years of its existence, gardens were

planted, greenhouses were constructed, and plants were imported from throughout the empire.

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