The Daily Telegraph

Wild truffle find is good for Parisian roof gardeners

- By Our Foreign Staff

FRENCH gourmets were celebratin­g yesterday after a wild truffle was discovered for what experts said was the first time ever in Paris.

The discovery in a hotel roof garden in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower comes as prices for the aromatic fungus have doubled to more than €5,000 euros (£4,432) a kilo.

Coming just before Christmas, when truffles are used to flavour such seasonal foods as foie gras and chestnut soup, it raises the hope of an undreamed-of windfall for the new wave of urban gardeners colonising city roofs.

“The discovery of this wild truffle is a wonderful example of how roof gardens and green roofs have a huge potential for urban biodiversi­ty,” said the Museum of Natural History, which revealed the find. The black “tuber brumale”, which tends to grow in the same regions as its more highly-prized cousin, the Perigord black truffle, was found at the base of a hornbeam tree on the roof of the Mercure Paris Centre Eiffel Tower Hotel by Frederic Madre, a researcher from the museum’s centre of ecology and conservati­on.

The variety found in Paris is said by experts to be stronger and muskier than the classic black Perigord truffle found in the warmer climes of southern France, Italy, Spain and Croatia.

The French capital is making a major push towards urban gardening, aiming to have 100 hectares of roof gardens in the next two years, a third of which will be used to grow herbs, vegetables and hops to flavour beer.

Undergroun­d car parks are also being turned over to grow mushrooms in beds made from used coffee grinds.

More than 70 major companies have already signed up to have the roofs of their office buildings converted into vegetable plots.

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