Botanical urbanism: a new project for the botanical garden at the University of Puerto Rico

摘要

For those who are neither botanists nor avid admirers of horticulture, plants and flowers, the topic of the botanical garden in the context of our media-saturated twenty-first century might at first seem a little antiquated — more a specialist subject for eccentric gardeners and historians perhaps. Conjuring up a medley of exotic images — endless parterres with strange Latin names, shapely Colonial lawns with ubiquitous white structures, colourful summertime flower displays, tropical glasshouses and unusual specimens, each carefully labelled with imprinted metal tags or bronze plaques — botanical gardens are today mostly tourist curiosities and emblems of bygone empires. Whereas many contemporary botanical gardens around the world are striving tofind renewed vitality through conservation, education and scientific research programmes, visitorship and revenue continue to decline in most cases, Is the botanical garden as a significant cultural place obsolete today, or at least outmoded in the face of modern science, technology, media and globalisation? Or is there scope for reinvention of the botanical garden as a cultural type somehow newly popular and relevant for the twenty-first-century imagination?