A date in the garden. In this case, not something overtly romantic, but a group of Erasmus international students who arranged a tour of the National Garden and are now eating sandwiches tucked into its flower beds.
At the pond, some feed the ducks shrimp and cherry tomatoes, or nuts procured from the street vendor at the entrance. The writer has shared her popcorn with the ducks in the past. All this constitutes a sympathetic misunderstanding of our relationship with the Garden. Sympathetic, because it results from the centuries-old coexistence of the residents and visitors of this city with the welcoming greenery. Misunderstanding, because it threatens, among other factors, its sustainability.
“The Garden is a designated historical monument. It’s like entering a museum, not any municipal green space”, she emphasizes to “K”. Amalia Karagounis, emeritus professor of Microbiology at EKPA and member of the Board of Directors. of the National Garden. “Well, it requires a special way in which the visitor behaves in this space. The dogs cannot play in the flower beds, one cannot ride a bicycle freely”, he adds. Nor, of course, should every visitor feed the animals of the Garden with the remains of the food consumed by humans. The animals are fed by garden workers, with food that does not pollute the ecosystem, or create hypertrophy in the lake from which dozens of birds, amphibians and fish live. The activities within the Garden must protect its environmental wealth and preserve its historical character, the authorities emphatically point out.
The roots of the Garden
The National Garden began to be created in 1839 and was completed in 1860, under the direction of the horticulturist Jean-Louis Barot, one of the most important of his time, according to Nikos Fournarakisthe company’s current CEO National Garden/Metropolitan Park S.A.which is responsible for the management of the Garden and the western hills of the Acropolis.
In the middle of the 19th century, Queen Amalia, beside the royal palaces, realized her vision of a botanical, Bavarian garden, one of those common at that time. “A botanical garden is defined as one that reflects a part of the plant diversity of an ecosystem for the purpose of environmental information, education, awareness of its visitors and perhaps also the preservation of these plants”, notes Mrs. Karagouni.
“Amalia’s first move was to bring 15,000 plants from Genoa and in 1846 she began the great project with Washingtonias, which is unique,” describes Nikos Fournarakis. “And not only because today we have the only row of Washingtonia trees in Southeastern Europe, but because the way these plants are transported, which came to this height from Piraeus to the garden, is unique,” he explains.
The Washingtonias, the palm-like trees at the entrance to the Garden, are perhaps its most photographed asset, giving the visitor the view of a subtropical landscape in the middle of the urban space. In a letter to her father, Amalia describes how it took forty days for the sailors to bring the trees from Piraeus to the Garden. He writes to him that “a carriage broke down and had the craftsmen make sledges all the way here. Only the root system of each tree was three meters in diameter,” adds Mr. Fournarakis. “But she was very happy. She thought she would complete it in a year, as appears from her correspondence. He said: “Now they are still not very beautiful”, while he saw the Washingtonians tied up.
In her letter, dated March 12, 1846, Queen Amalia writes:
I suggested that they build a carriage just for the phoenixes, because this work will go on for a long time. I am now beginning to ask information in Egypt about them, for, in case the garden grows any larger, I want to make a grove of palm trees.
The exhibition “Closed Athens is rising” organized by the General Archives of the State, brings to light rare documents from the time when Amalia ordered the construction of the Garden, such as the geological study of the soil of the palace area, in which gray clay, black plastic clay with lignite are found, and other rocks. Impressive, however, are the lists of plants in the Royal Garden, where one finds Persian walnuts, jasmines, kerleterias, hollyhocks, acacias, almonds, peach trees, sunflowers and alders. Today, the garden has about 450 historic trees over 180 years old.
*Catalogue of the plants of the Royal Gardens in French. Athens, September 14, 1839. [Γενικά Αρχεία Κράτους]
Ancient in the Garden
“I consider the work that Amalia did with regard to the archaeological finds to be very important,” says Nikos Fournarakis. “Whatever was found he left here.”
In a watercolor by Dodwell from 1821, the Mesogee door – or otherwise “Boubounistra gate”, which was part of the wall of Athens – is depicted. Although built during the Haseki era, the marbles of the gate were pieces of an old aqueduct and also bore a Latin inscription. As Nikos Fournarakis explains, with the end of Ottoman rule, the Athenians used materials from the wall to build their houses, but the architrave with the Latin inscription – clearly depicted in Dodwell’s watercolor – was saved. Jean-Louis Barot found it in the grounds of the Garden and left it there. And there it remains to this day.
The other unexpected connection of the Garden to the distant past is not so obvious. The Peisistratio aqueduct solves the problem of the lack of irrigation water and thus the Garden using the water of an aqueduct does not require the waste of drinking water, as is the case with the rest of the urban greenery.
However, this is not a novelty. The Peisistratio aqueduct is 2,500 years old and has been working since ancient times to this day in the same way, pumping water from the foothills of Hymettos and bringing it to the heart of this timeless city. An ancient structure that modern Athenians also use, without always realizing it, at least up to the square of Agios Thomas. A cast iron pipeline has already been installed there, as agronomist Katerina Agorastou, head of the National Garden department, informs us. “Furthermore, historic gardens must somehow connect the past with the future,” he says.
The present and the future of our Garden
The challenges of the Garden in the 21st century are inevitably linked to the climate crisis. “Organizations are exposed to all this intensity of phenomena and while they have some ability to adapt, this takes time. And they don’t have the time,” says Mrs. Agorastou. “That’s why our discussions about how to finally renew the population of trees in a historic garden, begin and enter another basis. Because our rules were “lose a tree and replace it with the same species”. But will we be able to do this in a few years?’
The agronomist who knows the Garden like the back of her hand, explains that the Garden of the first period, despite minor changes, remains essentially the same. “If one sees the floor plan of then and now, one immediately understands that they are talking about the same Garden. There are many elements of the Garden that have remained unchanged.”
However, the future of the Garden lies not only in maintenance, but also in renewal. The rule of thumb is always the preservation of its physiognomy, as the current people responsible for its planning say to “K”. Thus, according to the new director, interventions in seven of the 120 flower beds of its 155 acres will add color and healthier plants to the Garden, while a botanical greenhouse of 100 square meters is being built. which will house historic garden plants, under a Victorian-style canopy. At the same time, the new educational greenhouse will boost school visits to the Garden. Both are set to go live in the coming months.
“We don’t want innovations in the Garden”, notes Amalia Karagounis. “Here you can call someone and they will do the “Tatoi club” for you. We looked hard to find people who share the historicity of the Garden. We want to preserve the historicity and upgrade in the right way,” he says.
Besides, for its visitor, the garden is not only a deep breath of fresh air in an increasingly suffocating city. It is, much more, a new knowledge.
