This is one of my rules: when you are in a foreign city, look for a botanical garden. The one in Rome is a disappointment and the one in Berlin needs improvement, but the botanical gardens in New York, Edinburgh and Munich are unmissable. Even those who fall between these extremes keep ecological thoughts alive in a temporarily urbanized mind. One green thought leads to another, as I just discovered in Italy.
The Botanist of Padua garden in northern Italy its history dates back to 1545 and claims 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 of Venice, overlord of Padua, in May 1545. In December, Florence did the same at the behest of its grand duke Cosimo de Medici. While Pisa had a botanical garden before 1545, as a letter referring to it seems to demonstrate, Padua’s claim to be the oldest is based on it being the botanical garden that has existed the longest on the same site. Certainly these Italian gardens are all older than any in England. The first English botanical garden is Oxford, founded in 1621 on the site of a medieval Jewish cemetery.
I first saw the garden of Padua in a hot August 35 years ago. It was interesting, but it needed attention. He has received it since 2000 and is now in much better shape. It’s not just because it has a new visitor center, the Biodiversity Garden and the Botanical Museum. The greenhouses of Padua still preserve a good collection of carnivorous plants and specimens of the small variety of palm that fascinated Goethe on his visit in 1786. He studied it carefully and wrote a book on the “metamorphosis” of plants, defending an Ur- original plant from which all the others are derived. He had no idea about evolution and Darwin’s theories make it a curiosity.
The garden of Padua was not only the place of their misunderstanding. He appreciated other plants, especially a scarlet-flowered outdoor climber that remains a mainstay of London and warm-climate gardens. Campsis radicalns is extremely vigorous and willing to flower even in warm Britain, with those orange-red, trumpet-shaped flowers giving it the popular name Trumpet Vine. Its native place is the east coast of the US and southern Ontario.
English settlers in Virginia were quick to send plants home, although it was an invasive climber in the wild. In 1790 it was already well installed on the wall of Padua, where Goethe admired its magical effect like a tapestry, covering the wall with scarlet bells. The best 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 whether in ordinary gardens its vivid flowers are worth all the space they take up. its vigorous stems. It has no smell.
Goethe knew our camp as Bignonia, a name that has been used in the gardens for many years. The garden of Padua was not founded for botany as we understand it now. In 1533 the city university had a professor for the “reading of the Simples”: plants with therapeutic properties. The garden of Padua was to be a garden of medicinal plants, linked to this teaching. Its name and taxonomy were not ours, but it had a magnificent designed plan.
He architect Andrea Moroni drew it from the beginning. He was already working for the monastery that gave the land for the new garden: he devised a perfect circle in which individual flower beds would be placed. The circle was defined by a perimeter of high walls against which there were 16 segmented beds. Further in was a second circle dominated by four rectangular subdivisions, each with an additional flowerbed pattern.
The outer circle of walls has been replaced with a rectangular one, but the curved segments are still visible and are mostly planted with beautiful trees. Further in, the plant circle is still visible, as are interior subdivisions and small flower beds. They are a testament to meticulous and rational geometric planning. Botanical gardens should be based on an underlying notion of order, imposed by man on nature. The one in Padua still is.
The main interior subdivisions are defined by elegant railings, also a later introduction, but the beds are in a style that would also be transferable to English gardens. They are bordered and divided by vertically placed stone blocks with a thin, curved edge protruding just above ground level. Modern designers sometimes lay edge bricks to achieve a similar effect, but Padua stone blocks are more elegant.
I measured the space to help you copy it. Most small beds are about 3 feet wide and long. Some of them taper to a point and form a tapering triangle, but others are a grid of squares. The paths between them are 4 feet wide and lined with elegant yellowish-gray sand. No weeds protrude.
A mild, sunny October is not a hot August, but I found the outdoor plants and hundreds of pots more cheerful than on my previous visit. Stone-edged beds of crocuses and purple autumn colchicums are quite elegant, as are beds of red, not pink, amaryllis, and even a herb with fluffy purple heads, Muehlenbergia capillaris, which is widely sold in Great Britain. Stone edging prevents this muhly grass from becoming invasive.
What impressed me most was the resistance of two particular plants to Padua’s dry summer, even though the books usually say they need moist soil. Clearly this is not the case. One is a tree and the other is a good herbaceous plant that is now flowering.
Old, tall trees are a distinction of the botanical garden, as in Florence and Pisa. The ginkgo tree dates back to 1750, before Goethe’s visit, and is a true hermaphrodite, since a female branch has been grafted to its male trunk. In 1786 a magnificent Magnolia grandiflora, even larger than a magnificent one, was planted in the cloisters of the famous Padua cathedral. A tulip reaches into the sky, but what impresses me is a large swamp cypress, which does the same.
The swamp cypress, or taxodium, is often found in moist soils, but does not insist on it. Botanical gardens have large specimens in dry places and warm climates, from New York to Padua. In gardens and fields we should be more daring and use it away from water. We should also be bolder with the spotted toad lily or tricyrtis. The official advice is to always plant this October-blooming plant in shade and moist soil. Why is Tricyrtis formosana blooming freely in Padua, 2 feet tall and happy in a hot summer without watering? Here too I think we have been inflexible. Slugs, not the sun, are what kill this excellent plant in Britain.
It is good to visit Padua’s botanical garden, but the main reason to visit the city as a tourist is its Arena Chapel, with frescoes by Giotto, the master, from 1303 to 1305. With ecological thoughts in mind, I also visited it and took awareness of details I had never expected. Art and flowers have appeared in this column all year, but I’ll save Giotto’s surprises for that fitting season whose founding event he also painted: Christmas.
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