Hardy-Denonain Remarkable Botanical Garden

Acquired in 1973 by Germaine L'Hardy-Denonain, this garden was created and developed until it became a botanical garden, classified as remarkable since 2009. It houses several hundred Provençal and Mediterranean species.

The garden opens onto the Piazza deï Barri, opposite the La Casettina restaurant. Just descend a few steps and pass through the charming wrought-iron gate. This is the secret garden of our childhood, where we loved to hide. A little piece of paradise, barely 2,500 square meters, four terraces overflowing with vegetation, between which wind paths and romantic staircases. Here, native plants from the Massif des Maures mingle happily with acclimatized species.

Labellisé « Jardin remarquable » en 2009, label renouvelé en 2015, la visite de ce jardin est gratuite. Profitez-en, c’est si rare ! Ce jardin témoigne du travail et de la passion de sa créatrice, qui l’a façonné et enrichi au fil des années pour en faire aujourd’hui un véritable écrin de biodiversité méditerranéenne.

Over the centuries, the inhabitants of Gassin brought life to the riverbanks where Germaine L'Hardy-Denonain's botanical garden now stands. They cultivated fruit trees (pear, cherry, plum, almond, fig, jujube, carob, and strawberry trees) and all sorts of vegetables (chickpeas, broad beans, tomatoes, and lettuce). The leaves of old mulberry trees fed silkworms during the heyday of sericulture and silkworm farms. Cork oaks provided an abundant raw material for cork factories and manufacturers of shoe soles and agglomerates. Traces of the cork harvesting process are still visible on the finest of these trees.
The village keeps alive the memory of the past of these banks, which have regained their rural character, in harmony with the old village which overlooks them and with the forest massif which extends them to the Berle valley.
The garden offers you an immersion in Mediterranean biodiversity, trees and shrubs (cork oaks, hop hornbeams, myrtle and alaternus, rockroses and laurientin, mastic and spiny calycotoma, germander and tree lucerne), as well as herbaceous plants: bellflowers and spurge laurel, maidenhair fern and red valerian, ragwort and wartwort, navelwort and striped toadflax, lowland spurge and false morgeline, wild orchids, unblemished andryala, or even acanthus, poppy, chasmanthus, ivy, madder, tuberous lingonberry…
Horticultural species are not forgotten: irises grow alongside a Bancks rose near a hooded arum and an agapanthus.