Arquebuse garden

The full story

In the 16th century, this land lay at the gates of the town. The arquebusiers of Dijon, a company of marksmen armed with the arquebus, a firearm of the period, practised shooting here. The building that now houses the natural history museum, the Pavillon de l’Arquebuse, is described in the historic monuments records as a military building, with a building campaign in 1615. In 1772, the arcades taken down from the small cloister of the Champmol Charterhouse were used to make logettes, small shelters, for the arquebusiers: they can still be seen.

The botanical garden came later. As early as 1771, Bénigne Legouz de Gerland, a patron of the arts and member of the Academy, created a first one near today’s Boulevard Voltaire, then called the Allées de la Retraite. After the Revolution, the town council became the owner of the Arquebuse and the grounds were enlarged. In 1833 it moved the botanical garden here, adding an arboretum, a collection of trees. In 1836, a Dijon clockmaker, Léonard Nodot, founded the natural history museum.

On 28 December 1964, the site was listed as a historic monument: the façades and roofs of the building, the logettes and all the gardens, including the former shooting range. In 2001, the botanical garden and the museum merged to form the Jardin des sciences, since renamed the Jardin de l’Arquebuse. The Hubert-Curien planetarium, named after a crystallographer, opened on 9 September 2005: under its dome, 10 metres in diameter, images are projected across 360 degrees.

Around 810,000 visitors come every year. The botanical garden keeps a formal French layout, with flower beds edged with low box hedges. Along the paths you will come across the Three Graces in the Temple of Love, Hercules slaying the Nemean lion, a copy of Michelangelo’s Moses and busts of Legouz de Gerland, the sculptor Eugène Piron and the poet Aloysius Bertrand. The arboretum includes a cedar of Lebanon, a ginkgo biloba and a giant sequoia, and ducks swim on the Raines. Finally, the museum looks after an internationally renowned insect collection, with several hundred ‘type’ specimens, unique pieces.