On Martinique, a Caribbean Garden so Lush a French Empress Once Called It Home

Set foot into the Jardin de Balata, and you may think you have stumbled on the biblical Garden of Eden, so laden is it with sensory, seeable botanical treasures. Welcome to the Caribbean island of Martinique.

Martinique, an overseas department of France between St. Lucia and Dominica, is nicknamed the Isle of Flowers, and it suffuses you with a sense of wild beauty, exuberant colors and rich variety of tropical plants on this island, two-thirds of which is a designated nature park.

You’ll also find another surprise on this island, this one historic: the childhood home of  Empress Joséphine of France, the wife of Napoleon. Her loves and losses are the stuff of fairytales and nightmares.

The island is ethereal, evocative and, unlike Eden, easy to visit.

The beginnings of paradise on Earth

Jean-Philippe Thoze, a landscape designer and horticulturalist, created the garden on his grandparents’ former farm after spending years collecting tropical plants from across the globe. He began work on this self-funded garden in 1982 and opened it to the public four years later. Stephanie de Lavigne, director of Jardin de Balata, calls the garden “the fruit of a perfect alchemy between a return to his roots and an atypical artist.”

Numbers tell some of its story: Its nearly 7.5 acres are filled with 3,000 tropical plant types and 300 variety of palm trees. Unlike some botanical gardens I’ve visited, the hand of man is never obvious and allowed me, unimpeded, to admire sweeping views of the bay and the volcanic Pitons du Carbet mountains as I strolled a little slice of paradise.

I agreed with TripAdvisor, which notes it’s just six miles north of Fort-de-France, up a winding, narrow road, but this hushed, gorgeous escape into nature seems a world away. It’s so famous that Martinique issued a postage stamp of the garden in 2022.

A 1940s-movie lipstick red brightens the torch ginger (also called porcelain rose) whose flowers often grow as much as 5 inches wide; anthuriums; lobster-claw heliconia, whose tips are yellow-tinged; and Calliandra, which resembles a pom-pom. Lavender-colored blue water lilies, star-shaped with golden centers, adorn ponds. Tall,  slender royal palm trees, fan-shaped traveler’s palms, bamboo and mahogany trees flourish, as do begonias, bromeliads and succulents.

Rope bridges offer bird’s-eye views of the floral fest. Jewel-colored hummingbirds, small yellow-and-black bananaquit birds, forest thrushes and butterflies enhance the enchantment.

“Thoze designed the garden as a series of living tableaux, each landscape carefully crafted and composed like a work of art, reflecting his vision,” says de Lavigne, director of Jardin de Balata. “One striking example: the bromeliad zone, where carefully arranged plants showcase a stunning palette of yellow, orange, red, violet and green in different textures, and create a living painting that evolves with the light and seasons.

“But some areas are left more natural and untamed, like the torch ginger zone, mirroring the island’s raw landscapes.”

Visitor admissions fund the privately owned garden, which is open daily. Staff organizes workshops year-round, focused mainly on plants and animal here. Daily workshops on hummingbird and palm tree species take place outdoors during Carnival school holidays, when children are on vacation.

The white Creole-style house topped by a sloping orange clay-tiled roof, open to all visitors, was Thoze’s grandparents’ home. Some furnishings date back to their time, some of it from his, and the staff works to preserve his taste. Thoze, who died in 2017 at 76, chose the garden’s current owner to carry on his legacy.

The childhood home of an empress

Was it the lush surroundings of her Martinique childhood that led future Empress Joséphine to become a patron of botanists in France? Perhaps. What we do know is that she was born on Martinique in 1763 and raised on a sugar plantation in Les Trois-Îlets, 12 miles south of Fort-de-France, a 20-minute ferry ride plus a short taxi trip away from the garden.

A fortune-teller once predicted that the future empress born Marie Josephe Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, would grow up to be “more than a queen,”  I learned at Musée de La Pagerie, a museum devoted to her and her French noble (though nearly always impoverished) family. In 1726, they moved, possibly from St. Lucia, to Martinique, a  colony settled nearly 75 years earlier.

Here I saw her wooden bed from childhood, a portrait of her crowned as Empress at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and a picture of her chateau near Paris, the site of her famous garden. The stone building, the plantation’s former kitchen (all that’s left), also displays engravings of plantation life, plus a list of 115 people enslaved here that notes their ages, names and purchase prices.

She moved to Paris at 16. At 32, she was a widowed mother of two. In 1795, she met Napoleon at a Parisian society ball. (Her Martinique-born first husband, Alexandre de Beauharnais, was guillotined during the Reign of Terror in 1794.)  She bewitched Napoleon, six years her younger, with her beauty and charm. They wed the next year in Paris.

The upstart army officer from Corsica, who seized power in France in 1799 and declared himself Emperor of France in 1804, called her Joséphine, a name she kept for the rest of her life. Although she was officially Empress only from 1804-09 (their marriage was annulled because she bore no heir), Napoleon allowed her to keep her title and her homes at Élysée Palace in Paris, Château de Malmaison near Paris and Château de Navarre in Normandy, where she continued to live in grand style. Today, Élysée Palace is the home of the French president, while Château de Malmaison is a national museum in a Paris suburb.

Memories of her tropical Caribbean homeland haunted Joséphine in chilly Paris. Her garden at Malmaison, a 17th-century chateau, became famed for hundreds of rare plants. She aimed “to re-create the natural environment of her Martinican childhood” with her “dream of exoticism,” Christophe Pincemaille, senior documents research officer at Malmaison, writes.

She commissioned botanists to gather plants for her collection and financed a book by French botanist Etienne-Pierre Ventenat featuring 184 detailed drawings by Pierre-Joseph Redoute, an artist dubbed “Raphael of flowers.” “Jardin de la Malmaison” was praised as a masterpiece of botanical illustration.

The Empress, whose grandson was crowned Emperor of France, Napoleon III, died at her beloved Malmaison in 1814.