Jardin Lecoq

The city's main public garden — a 19th-century botanical park with remarkable trees

The Jardin Lecoq is Clermont-Ferrand's main public garden, a five-hectare botanical park laid out in the 1860s on a gentle slope between the city centre and the university district. The garden holds a varied collection of trees — including several specimens over 150 years old — a rose garden, a bandstand, and a small ornamental lake. It is a working botanical park as well as a public green space, and the adjacent Muséum Henri-Lecoq holds the natural history collections that the garden's founder assembled during his decades of research in the Auvergne.

The garden is free and open daily. It is particularly pleasant in early summer when the roses are in bloom, and in autumn when the old trees turn. The Muséum Henri-Lecoq next door has natural history collections focused on the region's volcanic geology and endemic flora — one of the better natural history museums in provincial France. The garden makes a calm counterpoint to the cathedral and old town bustle a few minutes' walk uphill.

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A story
The garden was laid out in 1863 by Henri Lecoq, a botanist and professor who spent decades cataloguing the flora of the Auvergne and building the city's natural history museum. Lecoq was also the mayor of Clermont-Ferrand from 1833 to 1834 and a friend of Charles Darwin, who corresponded with him about the geology of the volcanic region. The garden was his gift to the city in which he spent his scientific career.