Giardino botanico alpino Paradisia

In the side valley of Valnontey, a short drive from Cogne, a garden has been cultivating the Alps themselves since 1955. Paradisia gathers roughly a thousand alpine plant species on a mountainside inside Gran Paradiso National Park, taking its name from the white alpine lily that flowers here in early summer.

Why it matters

Paradisia is one of Italy's principal alpine botanical gardens, and its setting is the point. At about 1,700 metres on the floor of the Valnontey valley, within the national park, it recreates the altitudinal environments of the Alps — rock gardens, peat bogs, grassland communities — with the real massif of Gran Paradiso above. Founded in July 1955, it was named after Paradisea liliastrum, the alpine white lily whose flowering in June and July is the garden's signature event — the park authority is explicit that the name honours the flower, not the massif. The garden presents a range of alpine habitats and species within the valley landscape.

What to notice

The displays are arranged by altitude and habitat. The rock gardens show how saxifrages, gentians and primulas hold on to scree and limestone; the bog and pseudo-steppe reconstructions explain communities most visitors would otherwise walk past without reading. The petrographic exhibition, which pairs the flora with the geology beneath it, and for the lichen collection, an unusual specialisation. In early summer the Paradisia lilies give the garden its name-day display; later in the season the succession moves to other species, with flowering changing through the season. The butterfly garden links the plant collections to the insect life of the park. Paths cross the garden's sloping ground.

Context and history

The garden belongs to the mid-twentieth-century movement that created alpine botanical gardens inside Italy's protected areas both for science and for public education. Established in 1955 by the national park authority in the Valnontey valley, it developed within the framework of Gran Paradiso National Park and is today included in the Fondation Grand Paradis circuit of cultural sites in Cogne. Its scientific core is the living collection of about a thousand species, supplemented by the petrographic and lichen exhibits — the lichen collection, which colonises great boulders naturally on site, is described by the park as unique of its kind — . The choice of the name — a lily of the high meadows, not a garden hybrid — signals the institution's logic: this is a garden about wild alpine flora, arranged for study and admiration, not an ornamental park transplanted to the mountains.