Department of Botany

The Botany Department (formerly the Cantonal Museum and Botanical Gardens) originated in 1824 with the creation of a ‘large and carefully maintained herbarium’. Twenty years later, when the botanical collections were under the authority of the Natural History Museum, Edouard-Louis Chavannes was appointed as a separate curator. In 1860, the Botanical Museum became independent and its collections were brought together in a single room at the ‘Cure Dutoit’. In 1874, it was transferred to the ‘Maison Morave’ on Rue Saint-Etienne, below the cathedral, where lecture halls were provided for teaching botany and mineralogy.

In 1905, the completion of the Palais de Rumine made it possible to bring together all the cantonal natural history collections. The botanical collections remained there until 1967, when a building was constructed in the Cantonal Botanical Garden in Lausanne.

The Botanical Museum has always played, and continues to play, an important role in teaching the ‘gentle science’ and in the study and protection of the flora of Vaud.

Lausanne Botanical Garden
A donation from Albert de Büren in 1873 was the origin of the Cantonal Botanical Garden. More than 1,700 plants, most of them rockery plants, formed the embryo of the collection. Temporarily installed at Champ-de-l'Air, they were transferred in 1891 to the slopes overlooking Rue de Couvaloup. Enriched with numerous medicinal plants, the collection was then mainly intended for teaching pharmacy. A few decades later, a new garden project on the Montriond hill was launched at the instigation of Professor Ernest Wilczek. In 1940, private bequests made it possible to envisage its construction according to the plans of architect Alphonse Laverrière. The transplantation of thousands of plants began and, in 1946, the new Montriond Botanical Garden was inaugurated.

Pont de Nant Alpine Garden
Inaugurated in 1891, ‘La Thomasia’ (named in honour of the Thomas family, local botanists from Bex) is one of the oldest alpine gardens in the world. In addition to its original dual purpose as a scientific garden (with a collection of 3,000 labelled species and experimental crops of medicinal and fodder plants) and tourist attraction, it now also serves an educational purpose linked to the environment, with the creation of environments that recreate the natural conditions of the plants and provide a habitat for the microfauna associated with them.