Collection Management

The Haut Chitelet High Altitude Garden is covered in snow for most of the year. The plants can rest but there is no rest for the gardeners! Even if the garden does not open to the public before 1 June, the garden staff starts preparing the tourist season from April. Off-season, the staff is assigned to the Jean-Marie Pelt Botanical Garden in Villers-lès-Nancy.

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The gardeners’ work includes maintaining the site – weeding the rock gardens and alleys, mowing, rehabilitating paths, etc.–, preparing the seedbed and transplanting (about 400 species for both each year).

Saxifrage collection
— Saxifrage collection

New species are regularly introduced. They come either from exchanges of seeds between botanical gardens, thanks to a network of more than 800 correspondents throughout the world, or from wild plant seeds (for the flora in the Vosges region). The seeds are ordered through Index seminum, i.e. seed catalogues made by and for botanical gardens. The plant seeds collected in the wild are also checked, cleaned, packaged, and sent to other botanical gardens.

The botanical gardens of Grand Nancy and Université de Lorraine are part of the International Plant Exchange Network (IPEN), and adopt a strict code of conduct in accordance with the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Plant labelling is also an important task in a botanical garden that has to provide the names of the species presented to the public. Plant tags are regularly checked and updated. There is an engraving machine at the Jean-Marie Pelt Botanical Garden.