50 ans de botanique: fifty years of the Jardin botanique Jean-Marie Pelt — Villers-lès-Nancy

A botanical garden shows visitors its flowerbeds. What it does not usually show is the room where seeds are dried, the shelves of the herbarium, the registers where every plant is written down. For its fiftieth anniversary the Jardin botanique Jean-Marie Pelt, at Villers-lès-Nancy, is opening that side of itself.

The garden counts its fifty years from its present site. The old botanical garden of Nancy, founded by Stanislas in 1758 in rue Sainte-Catherine, is today the jardin Godron; half a century ago a new one was laid out on the Montet hill, first as the jardin botanique du Montet, later renamed after the botanist Jean-Marie Pelt. A photographic exhibition set out among the beds, 50 ans de botanique, retraces that history and the moments of the garden’s making. It stays up until the end of December.

On the weekend of the European Heritage Days the garden adds two things. Le parcours d’une graine follows a single seed from collection to conservation — recording, sowing, labelling, identification, mounting in the herbarium, and the rules that govern collecting plants at all — with botanists and mediators on hand on both afternoons. And on the Sunday morning there are two backstage visits, into the herbaria, the seed store, the library and the drying workshops, for a limited number of people.

Practical details

• Exhibition: 50 ans de botanique, 19 September to 31 December 2026, in the park, free
• Heritage Days: Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 September 2026 — Le parcours d’une graine, both days 2pm to 6pm, free entry; backstage visits on Sunday at 10am and 11am, free, limited places, online booking
• Where: Jardin botanique Jean-Marie Pelt, 100 rue du jardin botanique, 54600 Villers-lès-Nancy, France
• Who: Jardins botaniques du Grand Nancy et de l’Université de Lorraine

Nancy, a few kilometres away, is the city of the École de Nancy, and the Heritage Days weekend is a good one to combine the two. Cultural Heritage Online lists this event for readers in Lorraine this autumn.