At the head of the Valnontey, inside the Gran Paradiso national park, there is a botanical garden at seventeen hundred metres. The park authority opened it in 1955 to conserve and show the flora of these mountains, and the spot was chosen because the basin allows different environments to be rebuilt close to one another. The name comes from the white lily that grows in the meadows around.
What to see
The beds are arranged not for beauty but by habitat: moraine, scree, peat bog, rock face, alpine pasture. Each gathers the plants that in nature grow together, so you learn to recognise not single flowers but the company they keep, which is how a mountain is really read.
Then there are the section of medicinal plants, the one given to lichens, and the species brought from other mountain ranges of the world, which find here a climate like their own. Beside the garden works a station of alpine biology, and the work of herbarium and seed collection has gone on since the nineteen-seventies.
Visiting
The garden is at Valnontey, two kilometres from Cogne, reachable on foot along the stream or by shuttle; it opens only in the summer season, with a ticket, and closes in winter because under the snow there is nothing to see. An hour and a half.
Our editors' tip
Every so often stop looking down and lift your eyes to the slopes opposite: with binoculars you see ibex on the rocks. This park was created to save the last of them in the Alps, and the garden sits exactly at the head of the valley where they survived. The two things are the same story, seen from two heights.