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THURET ARBORETUM
Reviewed by ANDRE BEAUMONT
A brief, hour long tour of the arboretum at INRAE's Villa Thuret, a research establishment that increasingly works on decades long trials of how trees and shrubs acclimatise to the Mediterranean environment in southern France, on the last day of May 2026, yielded many an insight that a temperate arboretum cannot on plant acclimatisation.
There are 20,000 exotic species in this part of the world but only 10% are native. Many were introduced in the 19th century included plants that came back in 1804 with an expedition that Josephine de Beauharnais sent off to rival the voyages of expedition of Captain Cook.
Gustave Thuret introduced much of the scientific methodology of exotic plant observation for acclimatisation.
The white flowering tree, melaleuca linarifolia, known here as Josephine's tree, introduced by Thuret shortly after he arrived in 1858, is an early direct descendant of her tree at Malmaison
The famous pins parsols of this part of the world, the native pinus pinea, do not encroach on one another's canopy - they recognise the wavelength of the shadow cast by their own species
Chamaerops humilis, the only French palm, and native to the frequently rocky south-west, can regenerate from its base after fire and survive at -12C
The washingtonia robusta palm is one of the most resistant to insect attack but in a botanic garden you leave the dead annual leaves on it - for a tall tree those at the base can be older than the observer - and can keep the tree warm in cold
The majority are not quite that old
I like fig trees so was fascinated by the Australian flametree, Brachychiton acerifolius, with its similar leaf structure, at this stage, and which is similarly shallow rooted. The garden has to leave plenty of space for its horizontally spreading root structure
Many eucalyptus species from the Antipodes
The paperbark acts as a fire protection amongst other purposes
Melaleuca rhaphiophylla, swamp paperbark
Eucalptus dries the soil so glorious adaptation bordering a road
Also bordering the road, a historic specimen, c. before 1937, of Arbusier de Thuret, arbutus andrachne x arbustus canariensis
Since we heard no music, perhaps this was an alternative tour to show which woods a double bass is made of