Conservatory and Botanical Garden of the City of Geneva, Botanical garden and science museum in Geneva, Switzerland

The Conservatory and Botanical Garden of the City of Geneva occupies 28 hectares beside Lake Geneva and the UN park. Landscape architect Jules Allemand designed the grounds, with rock gardens reproducing Swiss and Alpine regions. The glass-and-iron Winter Garden by Henri Juvet dates from 1910–1911 and gained a symmetrical wing in 1935. Sections include an arboretum, medicinal plants, a garden of scent and touch, greenhouses and a small zoo.

Augustin Pyramus de Candolle founded the garden in 1817 in Bastions Park, funded by a subscription of 284 donors, and directed it until his death in 1841. His son Alphonse then led it briefly, followed by Georges Reuter, who studied alpine plants in purpose-built rock gardens. In 1904, under John Briquet, the garden moved to the Ariana estate on the right bank of Lake Geneva, where landscape architect Jules Allemand laid out the grounds and rock gardens.

The garden is not named after a botanist: it takes its name from the city of Geneva. Its scientific journal Candollea, published since 1922, honours founder Augustin Pyramus de Candolle. The garden runs a Paraguayan ethnobotany project begun in the mid-1990s with the Botanical Garden and Zoo of Asunción, drawing on about 5,000 medicinal plants known from Guaraní tradition.

The grounds are easy to navigate and open to visitors throughout the year, with opening hours that shift seasonally as daylight changes. Well-maintained paths and signage guide you through different sections, and there are benches and rest areas along the way.

A special research project documents medicinal plants and traditional knowledge from communities in South America that often goes unnoticed by most visitors. This work links scientific study with local practices and shows how age-old knowledge remains valuable for modern research.