The Washingtonia Palms of Villa Masséna

A Belle Époque prince's winter garden became one of Nice's most formal public spaces almost by accident of inheritance. Prince Victor d'Essling, descendant of Napoleon's Marshal Masséna, had his seafront villa built from 1898 in a neoclassical style modelled on the Villa Rothschild in Cannes, with a garden laid out by the noted French landscape architect Édouard André. When Victor's son ceded the property to the city in 1919, he attached one condition, a museum inside and the garden opened to the public outside. That happened in 1921, and André's design, structured around three formal flowerbeds on its eastern side with Washingtonia filifera palms rising at each corner, has since been restored to match his original plan after later alterations blurred it. No individual palm here carries a documented planting date, so any age given is an estimate tied to the garden's known 1898-1921 development window rather than a measured record, but the specimens are substantial enough to frame the formal garden exactly as André intended over a century ago.