The Jardin botanique de la Villa Thuret (3.5 hectares) is a renowned botanical garden located on the grounds of the Villa Thuret.
The garden was created in 1857 by Gustave Thuret (1817-1875), a botanist best known for studies of reproduction in algae, who used it to conduct plant acclimatization trials with friend and lichen expert Jean-Baptiste Édouard Bornet (1828-1911). In 1868, novelist George Sand described it in her Traveller’s Letters as the loveliest garden she had ever seen.
Today the garden contains approximately 2,500 trees and shrubs in its collections, representing some 1,600 exotic species (144 genera, 131 families) from Mediterranean or hot climate countries including South Africa, Australia, California, Chile, and Mexico, as well as China, Japan, and New Zealand. About 50 to 100 new species are planted each year.
