PublishedJun 5 2015
Picture the interior of the Roman Colosseum today: a high and mighty ring of stone glaring bare in the sun. Underfoot, hard concrete; ahead, and to the right and left, barriers. Once upon a time this was a tumbling, scented jungle of wild plants. Travellers in the 18th century could clutch pear trees and crooked elms on a scramble to the top; lovers picked anemones, and local inhabitants knew where strawberries and capers grew wild. The Colosseum was built as a sports arena, but that was only the first of many lives: in later centuries it was a private fortress, and broken up as a quarry for the Popes to construct their churches; beggars and traders shacked up in the arches. And for more than 1,000 years it was a unique ecosystem of plants seeded by chance — until cleansed by the archaeological restorations of the 19th century. In 1870 Rome became the capital of a single Italy where the new rulers wished to reclaim the gravitas of the classical past. The chapel, built for a Christian hermit, and martyrs’ crosses were demolished as symbols of superstition and the flora of centuries was ruthlessly stripped away, although botanists salvaged specimens for a commemorative herbarium that still exists today. To romantics, plants on ruins suggested fragility, and unexpected mutations of life; to the new rulers they represented weakness and decline and the obliteration of individual deeds. Poets like ruins; politicians want monuments. This clinical approach to heritage spanned much of the 20th century but in recent decades there has been a radical reappraisal of nature’s role in the life of historic buildings and urban development. The vanished wildness of the Colosseum is an inspiration to a movement of ecologists and landscape designers who argue for the value of the plants that flourish, spontaneously, in abandoned or derelict zones of modern cities. What’s called “ruderal botany” — the study of what grows in rubble — began in the Colosseum when in 1643 herbalist Domenico Panaroli catalogued what grew in the six-acre microclimate. {read}