Eight prizes for the Exotic Garden of Monaco
“Euroflora” exists since 1966 and is considered the showcase of floriculture in Italy. Once they arrived in Genoa, the gardeners of the Exotic Garden took a week to unpack the plants and compose a bed 6 meters in diameter with a plant about 5 meters high as its center. Then, at the end of the exhibition, we had to pack everything up, leave and replant in Monaco. The Exotic Garden presented 26 plants and obtained 8 prizes, all categories combined, including 7 first prizes. In 2021, the prestigious Ulysse guide declared it one of the most beautiful gardens in the world. It took a whole month of preparation for the delivery of the plants, custom-made packaging made of wood, kraft doormat and coconut straw. There had not been a similar transfer since that of cacti from the Saint-Martin gardens to the new Exotic Garden a century ago. The latter is currently closed, major security and consolidation work is being carried out there.
It all started at the end of the 19th century when Augustin Gastaud, head gardener of the Saint-Martin gardens near the Prince’s Palace on the Rock, planted “succulents”, another name for succulents, mostly originating in Mexico. Prince Albert I decided to dedicate a garden to them. It will be installed on steep terrain in the Révoires district topped by a small observatory. There were already agaves and prickly pears there. Development work began in 1913 under the direction of Public Works engineer Louis Notari. They will last more than twenty years due to the extent of the land, 11,500 m2 and especially its steep slope as well as the transfer of plants. Prince Louis II, who succeeded his father Albert I on June 26, 1922, inaugurated it definitively on February 13, 1933. The agricultural engineer Louis Vatrican was its first director, from July 1935 to April 1969. Thanks to him, the garden acquires an international reputation and to pay homage to him, a cactus discovered in Bolivia will be dedicated to him Vatricania guentheri. The place was first called “Hanging Gardens” then “Exotic Gardens” and since the early 1940s we only say “Exotic Garden of Monaco”. There are more than twenty thousand plants belonging to 3,000 species originating from Mexico, the Antilles, South America and Southern Africa, with the most extravagant shapes and all perfectly acclimatized in this splendid setting overlooking the Principality and the Mediterranean Sea. .
Visitors can also go to the nearby cave, called the “Observatory cave”, opened to the public in 1950. Discovered in 1916, there are traces of prehistoric human habitation. Several of them are exhibited in the Museum of Prehistoric Anthropology of Monaco located in the garden.
On October 31, 2017, HSH Prince Albert II accompanied by Mayor Georges Marsan, Monsignor Bernard Barsi, Archbishop of Monaco and Serge Telle, Minister of State, inaugurated the new Botanical Center. A reference collection of cacti and other succulent plants is kept there, 10,500 copies under glass are housed there and each year, thousands of packets of seeds are sent to more than 500 botanical gardens around the world.