Forms and Archetypes of the Botanical Garden

A “botanical garden” is an artificial environment created to produce, collect and classify a wide variety of plants for scientific, medical or educational purposes. Its recreational use is indeed a parallel consequence that distinguishes a botanical garden from a ‘garden’ or a ‘park’, with which it is often confused. Such clarification would not be necessary if it were not for the fact that today, more than in the past, with the decline of their original functions, botanical gardens often tend to encompass the recreational dimension. Currently, botanical gardens open to unorthodox practices. They are organised around the necessity to associate traditional taxonomy with formal and aesthetic criteria, typical of pleasure gardens. In this latter case, the use of the term Botanical Park might seem appropriate. This thinking refers primarily to the relationship between the form of the botanical garden and its function, a relationship that cannot be underestimated without the risk of losing its very reason for existence.