There is a particular quality of light in the Tinée valley on a June morning — the kind that arrives late over the ridgeline, unhurried, and falls across larch and pine with the weight of altitude. At 1,200 metres above sea level, the village of Roure sits where the road effectively ends and the mountain begins. No shops, no café terraces, no background hum of commerce. What the village does have, threaded across 17 hectares of steeply terraced hillside, is one of the most quietly extraordinary botanical spaces on the French Riviera's hinterland.
The Arboretum Marcel Kroenlein was established in 1988 by botanist Marcel Kroenlein — former director of Monaco's Jardin Exotique — together with Michèle Ramin. Its founding logic was never purely horticultural. Scientific, educational, artistic, social: the arboretum was conceived from the start as something more porous than a garden, a place where endemic Scots pine and European larch share ground with rare introduced species from climatically equivalent regions across the world, and where the work of no-mad artists surfaces unexpectedly along the paths, sometimes in conversation with a pond, sometimes with a particularly ancient trunk.
A Book Written for Every Reader
On Saturday 6 June 2026, the arboretum hosts a morning that gathers several of its ambitions into a single event. Gilles Mottet will be present in person for a reading and presentation of his book 'Le Vénérable Mélèze' — a work whose physical form is as considered as its content. Produced in standard print, braille, large characters, and tactile relief, it was designed from the outset to be held and understood by readers of every ability. The session, limited to twenty participants, will be led by the arboretum's specialist team.
The book's subject is an old larch struck by lightning — damaged, hollowed, yet alive. When the valley wind enters the cavity left by the strike, the tree becomes an instrument; it produces sound. Mottet's narrative turns on that transformation: the capacity of a living thing to convert damage into resonance. It is not a difficult metaphor to locate in a landscape where the larches have been standing since before the village's medieval walls were raised.
'Le Vénérable Mélèze' nous invite à un voyage littéraire et multi-sensoriel — and in the arboretum that gave rise to it, the invitation is entirely literal.
What the Morning Holds
The programme is structured around the senses in a precise, unhurried sequence. Visitors are invited to listen to the garden's own acoustics — the three ponds carry the sound of insects and rustling foliage, birdsong arrives in layers, and by late morning the sea breeze that travels up from the coast reaches the high canopy with an audible shift. The sound artist Alain Baudry has contributed a sonic work to the experience. There is also the scent of larch itself — the book contains a perfumed card — alongside the mountain herbs and kitchen garden in full early-summer growth. Tactile discovery of bark, plants, and edible flowers from the arboretum's collection is part of the guided circuit, and those who wish may take part in a fingertip reading of a chapter aloud.
The signing will follow the reading. Participants are asked to bring a picnic — the medieval village has no food vendors — and to contact the team in advance, both because places are strictly limited to twenty and because the staff can advise on access and prepare accordingly. Michèle can be reached at 06 07 48 48 76, Clara at 06 10 32 31 83, or by email at arboretum.roure@wanadoo.fr.
Roure lies in the Alpes-Maritimes, roughly an hour and a half inland from Nice along the Tinée valley. The drive itself is part of the experience — the road narrows as the altitude climbs, the coastal Mediterranean giving way by degrees to sub-alpine terrain. The arboretum's website is arboretum-roure.org. Come with time to walk the paths before or after; the panorama across the valley, at this elevation and in this season, is worth the ascent on its own terms.