The Garden you are in is called Saussurea in honor to a very rare plant: the Saussurea alpina, which grows in stony fields over 2000 meters high. In turn, this plant is named after a special man, the Swiss scientist Horace Bénédict De Saussure. A naturalist and mountaineer, De Saussure was the first to propose climbing Mont Blanc, offering a cash prize to those who reached the top. For a long time, Mont Blanc was called Mont Maudit, the cursed mountain, because all those who had tried to climb it had died in the attempt. However, in 1786 the crystal hunter Jacques Balmat and the district doctor Michel Paccard succeeded in the enterprise and reached the summit of the tallest mountain in Europe.
The rock is stone-still, but it is deep in its innards that everything begins: each element interacts harmoniously with the others to define the identity of an entire mountain. The heart of the Eastern Alps primarily consists of calcareous rock, rich in calcium carbonate: for this reason, they are home above all to plants that love limestone...