Jardin Exotique d’Èze

This guide to the Jardin Exotique d'Èze, on its clifftop above Nice, opens with a question: how do you get cactus from the deserts of Mexico to survive on bare rock above the Mediterranean? It traces the fortress that stood here from the 1200s until Louis XIV's troops blew it up, the two centuries the ruins sat open to the wind, and the postwar partnership between the village mayor and a Monaco-trained gardener who packed soil and cactus into every crack in the old stone. Listen for how the plants change completely between the garden's sunlit and shaded sides.