Miss Ellen Willmott was rich. Very rich. She lived in Warley Place, a noble house in what is now a nature reserve south of Brentwood in Essex. She had inherited a huge estate. But money and treasures were not enough for her, or, rather, she did not care. There was something she was more interested in: plants.
Plants from all over the world, the most colorful, the most exotic, including those that evoked the fragrances of Italy, such as chestnuts.
Born in 1858, she was a member of the Royal Horticultural Society and a very influential one, so much so that she received the first Victoria Medal of Honor awarded by the society to British horticulturists residing in the United Kingdom. In her life, she cultivated more than one hundred thousand plant species and cultivars; indeed, one of her favorite endeavors was the financing of expeditions designed to discover new species in remote places. More than 60 plants have been named after her or her home. She died in poverty in 1934, having spent everything she had. All her vast wealth was spent on plants. There is a little bit of Miss Ellen Willmott in all of us.
Today, the passion for gardening is on the rise, but the golden age of gardening was between the 1800s and early 1900s. During this time, a thirst for discovery drove teams of scholars to establish the scientific classifications we still use today.
After all, our obsession with taking species with us from one place to another has distant roots. "The beginning of civilization coincides with the ability of humans to collect what was around them and cultivate it," explained Antonio Perazzi, botanist and landscape artist, curator of the Radicepura green festival. His latest book: The Wild Nature of the Garden. In praise of weeds (La natura selvatica del giardino. Elogio delle erbacee – Einaudi, 2023). "From here, a global cultural system was born that coincides with the medicinal use of plants, with Ayurvedic stereotyping, and later with Magellan's explorations, the discovery of America, and colonialism in Asia, which has always been the main point of attraction for Europe." The Mediterranean is an area that has been subjected to perpetual contamination, with the absorption of myriad species that over the millennia: "olive and cypress trees could come from the Middle East," continued Perazzi. "Or perhaps, like the carob tree, they were already present in the land and were selected by the Arabs to produce larger fruits." On the other hand, a plant like the olive tree has swiftly become a staple, considering that its extract was used to create the primary tool for illumination, the oil lamp.
"The geographical displacement of plants, far from being the mere transfer of biological material, was deeply intertwined with sociocultural dynamics," explained Andrea Staid, anthropologist and professor of cultural and visual anthropology at Naba in Milan, and author of the book Being Nature (Essere Natura – Utet, 2022). "Migration, trade, and conquest were not only opportunities for physical movement but also vectors of cultural and biological exchange. This process of “plant cultural transition” was not unidirectional, but involved continuous negotiation and adaptation between introduced species and local ecosystems, as well as with pre-existing agricultural practices." Starting from the cultivation of wheat: "Its spread throughout Europe," continued Staid, "was not a simple act of sowing in new territories, but a complex process of cultural hybridization that saw the integration of new agricultural techniques, the transformation of agricultural landscapes and the reorganization of local economies.
The military conquests, in turn, in addition to the annexation of territories and resources, also involved the encounter-collision between different systems of botanical knowledge, with the discovery and introduction of new species that were integrated into the local repertoires." And this is what happened during the colonial period from the 17th to the 19th centuries: "We talk about botanical colonization," adds Staid. "The creation of monocultural plantations of coffee, tea, sugar, cotton, and other commercial crops, was not only an agricultural operation but a social engineering project that led to the transformation of landscapes, the reorganization of work, and the imposition of new production systems."
Thus, citrus fruits and prickly pears, which come from the East, have found conditions in the Mediterranean in which to thrive. Most of today's plants are the result of a hybridization with which the missionaries who crossed the Levant perfected the species they carried in their cloisters (at least according to the function for which they served; in nature, they had other objectives).
"On the one hand, there was practice and tradition," added Perazzi. "On the other hand, the frenzy of cataloging: it can be a human need, a fashion or, today, the search for a more effective scientific capacity to assess the loss of biodiversity. We always discover new species, but they disappear faster than we can classify them." In this perspective, the Italian naturalist Odoardo Beccari left for Borneo and described the world's largest flowers. And today, we try to “discover” new types. “Discoveries” – yes, but only by the Western world: the native peoples, in fact, in contact with those plants have grown and given them a name. Then, we arrive on the scene and feel the need to classify them according to our taxonomy and find names that we culturally attribute so that we can learn about them. So, aesthetics are a cultural concept. "In the botanical gardens of the world," explained Perazzi, "we see flowers now considered unfashionable.
In Japan, they pay attention to details of intersections of shapes or colors that will never be repeated. For them, the search for the ephemeral matters."
In these plant voyages, however, we must limit the risks: some exotic species may colonize the environments where they land and become a problem. "For this reason, camphor, for example, is absolutely prohibited in Australia and New Zealand," added Perazzi. "We have always been importers, we have always had open ports. And today, even more so. But we must be on guard: in the Mediterranean, the ailanthus tree and buddleja have arrived, the former to grow silkworms, the latter as a decorative plany.
Today, The former is hated because it grows like a weed – the second is loved because it attracts butterflies. But if the former colonizes mainly peripheral and botanically impoverished areas such as ruins and construction sites, the latter, in mountainous terrain, risks creating hydrogeological damage by blocking water flow."