Columns - Botanical Stories
by Marta Galli
by Marta Galli
Once upon a time, in books, there was the Earthly Paradise.
Its illustrations can be found in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century volumes preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where miniaturists depicted it as a compact enclosed garden, populated with fruit-laden trees and gentle beasts. From here, Adam and Eve were expelled—pushed out through a narrow door that would close behind them on a wretched day.
The hortus conclusus is, after all, the archetype of the garden and at the same time an allegory of Eden, so much so that the monastic garden in the Middle Ages sought to reconstruct within the cloisters the paradisiacal harmony and the order that had been lost. Its layout places water at the center—a well or a fountain—from which four paths depart, recalling the rivers described in the Book of Genesis. A scheme, in fact, borrowed from a pre-Christian model, along with all its symbolism.
Simply by looking at a Persian carpet, we can detect four quadrants marked by the sacred rivers, and a series of little palms and vegetal silhouettes that evoke a luxuriant oasis.
Just as the Paradise of the Christians is lost, as is Milton’s—ça va sans dire—most of our gardens have been erased by time; and not only those mythical or legendary, such as the hanging gardens of Queen Semiramis in Babylon, but more prosaically the ancient parks of which only ruins remain, faint traces. Gardens, as we know, are made of the same substance as dreams—sharing with them transience and elusiveness.
Only the gardens of art are imperishable. Also in Paris, at the Musée de Cluny, there is one of the works that has most inspired musicians and writers, and that even appears in Harry Potter: La Dame à la licorne, a cycle of fifteenth-century Flemish millefleurs tapestries.
Here too, one notices the garden bordered by a fence—as in medieval tradition—climbed over by roses. The meadow is densely flowered, and one can recognize lilies (Lilium candidum), carnations (Dianthus), daffodils (Narcissus), violets (Viola odorata), lily of the valley (Convallaria majalis), wild strawberries (Fragaria vesca). As Arturo Graf writes in Myths, Legends and Superstitions of the Middle Ages, “These flowers are ours… except that they have far more vivid colors and much gentler scents.” Botanists have identified more than eighty species. But what anyone with a bit of experience of the plant world can notice is that all these species could not be found in bloom at the same time in our gardens. It can only be, therefore, a blessed remnant of the Earthly Paradise.