01 A garden that was a laboratory

It began with five hectares and was progressively enlarged to the thirty-two it has today. And the figure that gives the true measure of what it was comes from 1867: that year the garden held 8,214 species and varieties in cultivation. Not specimens: distinct species and varieties.

The specialist literature describes it as one of the world's most important test and acclimatisation gardens. In 1867 it was so by the numbers, not by reputation.

A view of the garden from above, taken from a cable car: a hillside entirely covered in dense vegetation, with very tall palms rising above the lower canopy, patches of pale-trunked bare trees on the right, and at the bottom of the frame a curving path and an open expanse of pale ground.
The garden from above. Its thirty-two hectares fill the whole slope between the city and the sea.Mouh2jijel / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0·CC BY-SA 3.0

02 The avenues and their dates

The garden is organised into single-species avenues, each planted with one species, and each with its own date. The plane avenue, which is the main entrance, was planted in 1845. The dragon tree avenue in 1847. The ficus avenue in 1863. There are also bamboo and palm avenues.

That detail matters more than it seems. A single-species avenue is a working tool: it lets you compare the behaviour of dozens of identical individuals in the same soil and the same light. What is walked today as a promenade was designed as an experiment with replicates.

Very wide panorama of the garden entrance: a broad path of pale gravel opens at the centre, flanked left and right by two enormous masses of bougainvillea in intense purple flower; between them, beds of red and pink roses, cone-clipped hedges and, behind, a long pool with the palm avenue receding beyond.
The entrance in spring. Behind the bougainvillea begins the plane avenue planted in 1845.Billal Haddadi / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0·CC BY-SA 4.0

03 The Tarzan yell

In 1932 a Tarzan film was shot here with Johnny Weissmuller. The reason is obvious the moment you walk in: in 1932 this was probably the most accessible piece of jungle in the world for a European film crew, with a density of tropical species that existed nowhere else at that distance from a port.

The dragon tree from which Tarzan gives his famous yell is still in the garden. It is one of the rare occasions when a film set and a documented botanical specimen are exactly the same object, and it is still there for anyone who wants to check.

A corner of the garden with a low whitewashed pavilion under a tiled roof, a dark carved wooden gallery on posts and pointed-arch windows; in front, a floor of irregular pale stone slabs with a tiled border, low beds of fine-leaved plants and, to the right, the thick branching trunk of a large tree.
One of the garden's pavilions. The domestic scale of these buildings contrasts with the size of the trees around them.Rachid Hamatou / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0·CC BY-SA 4.0

04 What is left today

Here it is worth being honest about the figures. From those 8,214 species and varieties of 1867 the count fell to some 3,000 under the national agronomic research institute, and today it stands at over 1,200. It is a magnificent garden, but it is a fraction of what it was.

The garden was closed to the public between 2001 and 2009 for restoration: eight full years. And since it reopened the response has been enormous: 1.9 million visitors in 2017 and 2 million in 2022.

Two million people a year across thirty-two hectares is a lot of people. It is worth going first thing, on a weekday, and walking the avenues in the order they were planted: planes, dragon trees, ficus. It is a route through eighteen years of work done in twenty minutes.

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Lucía Montes

Worth Knowing editor · Flowtravel

Lucía chases the story behind the everyday object.

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