The Tropical Garden [antikvár]

IntroductionLuxuriant, faintly mysterious, the tropical garden reflects many of man^s oldest dreams with its never-ending growth and splashes of exotic colour.Strelitzia Reginae, the Bird of Paradise flxiwer; early drawings like this excited the European interest in tropical plants and led to both personal and official collections. TRedoute les Liliacees, v. 2, plate78).For centuries, long before it assumed any clearly defined shape, the alluring concept of a tropical garden was part of the European imagination. Eden was perhaps the earliest manifestation, that paradise of eternal bloom and fruitful abundance, whose loss seemed so painful to devout dreamers in the sands and snows of less hospitable climates; but there were doubtless other, more personal visions conjured up on dark winter nights, similar places where summer never ceased and nature yielded its marvels with little or no labour.An element of reality entered such fantasies with the age of exploration, first through drawings and dried specimens brought back by adventurous botanists, later through some of the living plants, many of them every bit as bizarre as any of the vague imaginings. (The tropics hid no 'man-eating tree', as legend claimed, or at least none has been found; but in Borneo and the Philippines there were exceedingly odd pitcher plants that trapped and then slowly digested quite large insects.) Thanks to such revelations, painters could enhance their ideal gardens with increasingly accurate ferns and palms and exotic fruit trees - the banana often turned up as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil even though the jungles in which they allegedly grew bore a remarkable resemblance to the neat, orderly arrangement of home.The European fascination for tropical plants reached a peak during the 19th century, when scarcely any major capital, however frigid, lacked some sort of facility for displaying the latest botanic wonder to the public. Nowhere was this more evident than in England; moreover, odd though the suggestion may seem, it can also be argued that no country had a greater influence on the subsequent development of pleasure garden designs and their plant components far away in the actual tropics.