Description
The Giardino dei Semplici is Florence's botanical garden, founded in 1545 at the wish of Cosimo I de' Medici: more than two hectares of flowerbeds, greenhouses and centuries-old trees, with its entrance on Via La Pira. It is one of the oldest botanical gardens in the world still in its original place.
It is a peaceful oasis in the city center, ideal for plant lovers, for families with children and for anyone who needs a pause in the shade between one museum and the next.
The garden is divided into large beds edged with pietra serena, with a round fountain full of water plants in the middle. On the conifer lawn grow trees that are remarkable for their age and size, such as a bald cypress and a dawn redwood.
The oldest trees tell the story of the garden: a yew planted in 1720 by the botanist Pier Antonio Micheli and a cork oak from 1805, whose bark has never been stripped.
In the greenhouses, built in the 1800s, tropical plants grow: coffee, bananas, the traveler's tree, along with collections of orchids, carnivorous plants, succulents, cycads and citrus. Other small greenhouses of glass and metal hold ferns, begonias and bromeliads.
There is also a little pond with lotus flowers, the beds of edible and medicinal plants, a small Italian-style boxwood garden and a bed of palms that grow outdoors. In a niche stands a sixteenth-century bust of Aesculapius, the god of medicine.
The “simples” were medicinal herbs. Cosimo I wanted a garden where medical students could study them from life: he rented a plot from the Dominican nuns, and Niccolò Tribolo, the architect of the Medici gardens, designed it.
In the 1700s Micheli made it a research center known across Europe, in contact with scholars from abroad. Later the garden became, for a few decades, an experimental farm, before going back to the simples and opening to the public in 1864.
The most famous plant is the Amorphophallus titanum, with its gigantic flower, which blooms when it feels like it: here it happened, exceptionally, in 2002 and twice in 2007.
It is a peaceful oasis in the city center, ideal for plant lovers, for families with children and for anyone who needs a pause in the shade between one museum and the next.
The garden is divided into large beds edged with pietra serena, with a round fountain full of water plants in the middle. On the conifer lawn grow trees that are remarkable for their age and size, such as a bald cypress and a dawn redwood.
The oldest trees tell the story of the garden: a yew planted in 1720 by the botanist Pier Antonio Micheli and a cork oak from 1805, whose bark has never been stripped.
In the greenhouses, built in the 1800s, tropical plants grow: coffee, bananas, the traveler's tree, along with collections of orchids, carnivorous plants, succulents, cycads and citrus. Other small greenhouses of glass and metal hold ferns, begonias and bromeliads.
There is also a little pond with lotus flowers, the beds of edible and medicinal plants, a small Italian-style boxwood garden and a bed of palms that grow outdoors. In a niche stands a sixteenth-century bust of Aesculapius, the god of medicine.
The “simples” were medicinal herbs. Cosimo I wanted a garden where medical students could study them from life: he rented a plot from the Dominican nuns, and Niccolò Tribolo, the architect of the Medici gardens, designed it.
In the 1700s Micheli made it a research center known across Europe, in contact with scholars from abroad. Later the garden became, for a few decades, an experimental farm, before going back to the simples and opening to the public in 1864.
The most famous plant is the Amorphophallus titanum, with its gigantic flower, which blooms when it feels like it: here it happened, exceptionally, in 2002 and twice in 2007.