Modern lessons from the world’s oldest botanical garden - FT中文网
登录×
电子邮件/用户名
密码
记住我
请输入邮箱和密码进行绑定操作:
请输入手机号码,通过短信验证(目前仅支持中国大陆地区的手机号):
请您阅读我们的用户注册协议隐私权保护政策,点击下方按钮即视为您接受。
FT商学院

Modern lessons from the world’s oldest botanical garden

Padua traces its history back to 1545, but it still has new things to teach us

Padua’s Orto Botanico

Here is one of my rules: when in a foreign city, check for a botanical garden. Rome’s is a disappointment and Berlin’s needs an upgrade, but the botanical gardens in New York, Edinburgh and Munich are unmissable. Even those that fall between these extremes keep green thoughts alive in a temporarily urbanised mind. One green thought leads to another, as I have just found in Italy.

Padua’s botanical garden in northern Italy traces its history back to 1545 and lays claim to be the oldest in existence. In Italy the 1540s were indeed a formative time for botanical gardens. Padua’s began with a vote by the Senate in Venice, Padua’s overlord, in May 1545. In December, Florence followed suit at the prompting of its grand duke Cosimo de Medici. While Pisa had a botanical garden before 1545, as a letter referring to it seems to prove, Padua’s claim to be the oldest rests on it being the botanical garden that has existed longest on the same site. Certainly, these Italian gardens are all older than any in England. The first English botanical garden is Oxford’s, founded in 1621 on the site of a medieval Jewish cemetery.

I first saw Padua’s garden in a hot August 35 years ago. It was interesting, but in need of attention. It has received it since 2000 and is now in much better form. It is not only because it has a new visitor centre, Biodiversity Garden and Botanical Museum. Padua’s glasshouses still have a good collection of carnivorous plants and specimens of the small variety of palm tree that fascinated Goethe on his visit in 1786. He studied it carefully and went on to write a book on the “metamorphosis” of plants, arguing for an original Ur-plant from which all others derive. He had no idea of evolution and Darwin’s theories make his a curiosity.

Padua’s garden was not just a site for his misunderstanding. He appreciated other plants, especially a scarlet-flowered outdoor climber that is still a mainstay of gardens in London and warm climates. Campsis radicans is extremely vigorous and willing to flower even in warm Britain, bearing those red-orange trumpet-shaped flowers that give it the popular name of Trumpet Vine. Its native home is the east coast of the US and southern Ontario.

English settlers in Virginia were quick to send plants back home, though it was an invasive climber in the wild. By 1790, it was well established on Padua’s wall, where Goethe admired its magical effect like a tapestry, covering the wall with scarlet bells. The better form now is Madame Galen, one with bigger and better trumpets, which originated in Italy and was put on the market in the 1880s. I can never decide if in ordinary gardens its vivid flowers are worth all the space its vigorous stems occupy. It has no scent.

Campsis ‘Madame Galen’

Goethe knew our campsis as Bignonia, for many years its name in gardens. Padua’s garden was not founded for botany as we now understand it. In 1533 the city’s university had a professor for the “reading of Simples”: plants with therapeutic properties. The Padua garden was to be a garden of medicinal plants, linking up with this teaching. Its naming and taxonomy were not ours, but it had a superbly designed plan.

After his visit, Goethe wrote a book arguing for an original Ur-plant from which all others derive. He had no idea of evolution

The architect Andrea Moroni drew it at the very beginning. He was already working for the monastery that ceded the ground for the new garden: he devised a perfect circle in which individual flower beds would lie. The circle was defined by a perimeter of high walls against which there were 16 segmented beds. Further inside there was a second circle dominated by four rectangular subdivisions, each with a further pattern of flower beds.

The outer circle of walls has been replaced by a rectangular one, but the curving segments are still visible and are mostly planted with fine trees. Further inside, the circle of the plan is still visible, as are the inner subdivisions and little flower beds. They are a testimony to meticulous and rational geometric planning. Botanical gardens should be based on an underlying notion of order, imposed by man on nature. Padua’s still is.

The main inner subdivisions are defined by smart railings, also a later introduction, but the beds have a style that would be transferable to English gardens too. They are edged and divided by stone blocks laid vertically with one thin curved edge protruding just above ground level. Modern designers sometimes set brick on edge for a similar effect, but Padua’s stone blocks are more stylish.

I measured the spacing to help you copy it. Most of the little beds are about 3ft wide and long. Some of them taper to a point and make a narrowing triangle, but others are a grid of squares. The paths between them are 4ft wide and surfaced with smart grey-yellow grit. No weeds poke through.

Mild, sunny October is not hot August, but I found the outdoor plantings and the hundreds of pots more cheerful than on my former visit. Stone-edged beds of purple autumn crocuses and colchicums are rather smart, as are beds with red, not pink, amaryllis and even a grass with fluffy purple heads, Muehlenbergia capillaris, which is widely on sale in Britain. The stone edges prevent this muhly grass from becoming invasive.

What most impressed me was the resistance of two particular plants to a Paduan dry summer, though books often say they need a damp soil. Plainly they do not. One is a tree and the other is a good herbaceous plant, flowering now.

Tricyrtis formosana ‘Dark Beauty’

Old tall trees are a distinction of the botanical garden, as in Florence and Pisa. A ginkgo tree goes back to 1750, before Goethe’s visit, and is a true hermaphrodite, as its male trunk has been grafted with a female branch. A superb Magnolia grandiflora was planted in 1786 and is even bigger than a fine one in the cloisters of Padua’s famous cathedral. A tulip tree towers to the sky, but what impresses me is a big Swamp cypress, which is doing likewise.

Swamp cypress, or taxodium, is often found in wet ground, but it does not insist on it. Botanical gardens have big specimens in dry places and hot climates, from New York to Padua. In gardens and fields we should be more bold and use it away from water. We should also be bolder about the spotted little toad lily or tricyrtis. The official advice is always to plant this October-flowering plant in shade in damp soil. Why though is Tricyrtis formosana flowering freely in Padua, 2ft high and happy in a hot summer without irrigation? Here too I think we have been inflexible. Slugs, not sun, are what kills this excellent plant in Britain.

Padua’s botanical garden is good to visit, but the overriding reason for visiting the city as a tourist is its Arena chapel, frescoed by Giotto, the maestro, from 1303-1305. With green thoughts in mind I visited it too and became aware of details I had never expected. Art and flowers have featured in this column all year, but I will save Giotto’s surprises for that appropriate season whose founding event he also painted, Christmas. 

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram 

版权声明:本文版权归FT中文网所有,未经允许任何单位或个人不得转载,复制或以任何其他方式使用本文全部或部分,侵权必究。

为何豪华电动车销量仍停留在“起步挡”

消费者看不到为电动车支付高价的理由,加之中国消费者偏好更便宜的代步车,导致需求疲软。

我的朝圣之旅:走进乐高之家

在丹麦小镇比隆,奥利弗•贝里探访征服全球的小积木的诞生地——并走进新开幕的乐高大师学院,与热衷者们相聚。

美国政府称,哈马斯可能通过袭击巴勒斯坦人来破坏停火

美国国务院表示,若该武装组织按计划采取行动,将采取措施保护加沙的平民。

美国各地爆发大规模集会,举行“不要国王”抗议活动反对特朗普

共和党人谴责示威为“反美”,民众则反对政府的强硬政策。

中国科企巨头暂停稳定币计划

监管机构对私下控制的货币兴起表示担忧。

黑石称华尔街对AI带来的颠覆威胁过于自满

乔纳森•格雷表示,这家私募资本集团在评估交易时已将该技术带来的风险“列为首要考虑”。
设置字号×
最小
较小
默认
较大
最大
分享×