The air in Menton carries something different from the rest of the Riviera — denser, slower, threaded with citrus and something older. Tucked behind the avenue Saint-Jacques, the Jardin botanique Val Rahmeh sits at the precise point where the Alps begin their descent toward the sea, and where a subtropical microclimate — the only one of its kind in France — allows more than 1,800 species to grow in improbable proximity: towering bamboo beside dwarf palms, tropical fruit trees shadowing rare specimens that no longer exist in the wild. On a Sunday morning in early June, this garden becomes something else as well: a stage for storytelling.
On Sunday, 7 June 2026, artist Sofia Rocha Mondragon leads two family workshop visits at Val Rahmeh, at 11h00 and 15h00. A 2024 graduate of the Villa Arson — Nice's prestigious school of contemporary art — Rocha Mondragon has built a practice around the intersection of botany and artistic creation, and this event is the fruit of a collaboration between Val Rahmeh and the Villa Arson's own gardens. Each session is limited to 20 people.
The Garden as Archive
Val Rahmeh is a site of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, which gives it a dual scientific mission: the conservation of threatened, rare, or wild-extinct plant species, and ethnobotany — the study of the relationships between plants and human cultures across time. That second discipline is precisely where Rocha Mondragon's workshop takes root. The plants in this garden are not merely botanical specimens. They are travellers. They arrived from every continent, carrying with them centuries of attributed virtues and powers — medicinal, mythological, protective, dangerous. They crossed oceans in the holds of ships, in the pockets of botanists, in the hands of traders. Now they grow side by side in the Menton sun, and they have accumulated new stories in the process.
'Des vertus et des pouvoirs sont associés à de nombreuses plantes depuis toujours. Ces plantes ont traversé les siècles et elles ont voyagé, depuis tous les continents.'
The workshop's title — La Barbe de Jupiter a du Souci à se faire — hints at this layered world, where plant names themselves carry legend. Jupiter's Beard, pot marigold: common garden plants whose names are doorways into older systems of belief and meaning.
What the Afternoon Holds
The format is a slow walk rather than a lecture. Rocha Mondragon guides families through the garden, pausing at plants whose stories she has researched and reimagined. The register shifts between the factual and the legendary — real botanical history braided with the kind of narrative that has always surrounded plants with particular powers or appearances. The artist's approach, as described in the event, is to let the real and the imaginary cross over, giving life to new creations. Children are invited not merely to listen but to make: the 'atelier' component means creative work emerges from the walk itself.
For families with children who have grown restless with conventional museum formats, the structure here is worth noting:
- The session moves through open garden space, not a closed room
- Storytelling is the primary mode — accessible, non-didactic
- The creative output is connected directly to what participants have seen and heard
The Villa Arson connection is also quietly significant. The school, perched above Nice, has long maintained gardens as part of its artistic environment, and the dialogue between its green spaces and Val Rahmeh's scientific collections gives the project a particular coherence — two institutions, two cities along the same coast, linked by a shared interest in what grows between art and nature.
Val Rahmeh itself rewards time beyond the workshop. The microclimate means that even in early June the garden is in full, layered growth — the kind of density that makes you understand why this particular slope above the Mediterranean was chosen, in the early twentieth century, as the site for a botanical garden of international ambition. The sea is visible through the trees. The mountains are immediately behind. The garden occupies its narrow band of exception with quiet authority.
Sessions run at 11h00 and 15h00. Each is limited to 20 participants. Booking details and further information are available at the garden's website. Arrive a few minutes early — Val Rahmeh's entrance on avenue Saint-Jacques is easy to miss if you are moving at Riviera pace, which is to say, too quickly.
