Your summer destination: the Lautaret Alpine Garden!

Surrounded by the magnificent glaciers of Alps and the Ecrins National Park, this garden houses over 2,000 plant species and is open to the public all summer long.

The Jardin du Lautaret, part of the Joseph Fourier Alpine Station, opened its doors at the beginning of last June. The garden is found in the Col du Lautaret (Lautaret pass) at a height of 2,100 meters, across from the glaciers of Mount Meije, part of the Ecrins Alpine range. Its rich collections of alpine and mountain plant life make it a major resource for researchers as well as of one of the most beautiful gardens in Europe.

You, too, can take advantage of the garden, whose two hectares are open to the public until September 2, 2018. You’ll see plants from nearly all the world’s mountain enviroments: the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Caucasus, the Balkans, the Sierra Nevadas, the Andes, the Himalayas, the Atlas, as well as the mountains of Japan and Siberia. The collections include medical plants, like arnica, and rare specimens, such as the alpine chardon bleu or blue star, the famous himilayan blue poppy.

This beautiful garden is also a research center

Created nearly a century ago by Professor Jean-Paul Lachmann of the Université de Grenoble, the Jardin du Lautaret is one of Europe’s oldest gardens. The facility provides resources for advanced study of mountain ecosystems and their response to global changed. The garden’s location allows for a large degree of natural biodiversity, with more than 1,500 native plant species in the 20 km surrounding the garden. Covered with wildflowers, the natural meadows which enclose the facility are, themselves, a naturally occuring garden.

The garden also houses a research laboratory as well as showrooms and classrooms, all part of the Galérie de l’Alpe, which opened in 2016. The Galérie is an important space for public science education and lifelong learning. This summer, the Galérie is housing the exhibition Dominique Villars, from the collections of the Grenoble Science Museum. Villars was an 18th century botanist, moutaineer, and medical doctor, author of an early catalog of alpine flora.

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– UGA

Updated on 29 August 2018