2008 As the garden enters its third century, the allées of palm trees stand tall, along with rows of mango and rubber trees. Rio has grown all around, the garden’s neighbours are now apartment towers and favelas. Far beyond the city, clear-cutting of the Amazon continues apace. As the landscape outside is decimated, the Real Jardim Botânico’s mission has shifted to the protection of Brazil’s biodiversity. Yet even within its walls, it is hard to protect nature from humans. No one can stop vandals from etching their initials in the trunks of the pau mulato trees, and the Amazonic sector looks a bit worse for the wear. Myteriously, piles of cut-up trunks appear on this and that path, as if the practice of logging also demands to be represented in the garden’s microcosm. The garden’s specimens now seem less on public display than behind a cordon sanitaire, protected from the ravaging forces of the outside world.
Rodrigues Barbosa focused on the wealth of his surroundings, sending research missions into the Brazilian wilderness and publishing the definitive survey of Brazilian palm species. Inside the garden, he modernised and restored order. As he amassed species in great new quantities, Brazilian plants finally gained ascendance, 396 out of 837 according to one guide, neatly laid out and labelled on the garden’s grounds, or catalogued and archived in the new herbarium. There is a surreal quality to such a space, the intersection of a tropical jungle and a formal garden plan, of the Buriti palm and an abundance of French statuary, all enclosed within wrought iron fences but sited just beneath a tropical Atlantic forest. A garden of labelled and formally arranged tropical plants was a curious paradox, but one with great popular appeal. This was the age of the great public park, and the garden was claimed as one. With the growth of the city of Rio and the extension of a tramway line to the garden’s gates, it became a popular site for Sunday strolls and socialising. Science and pleasure quickly came into conflict. While the director vaunted the garden’s attendance figures, Barbosa moved swiftly to end the execrable practice of picnicking.
Sometimes it is hard also to protect humans from nature. The garden has acquired, in the last century, an unusual collection—a small community of some five hundred families on its grounds. They are employees of the garden and their descendants, who were once given permission to build their homes inside the garden’s walls and have now lived there for generations. For many years the relationship between garden and residents was symbiotic, but more recently the garden’s administration has labelled them an invasive species, and wants them out. In one very ugly episode, armed police officers were sent to force out an elderly household. The stand-off has continued for decades with no conclusion in sight. Though the garden claims that their homes stand in the way of its work of preservation, the residents of Horto (the Orchard, as the neighbourhood is called) would like to preserve their close-knit community. With comfortable houses, close to work, free from violence, impossible to replicate in the city outside, the garden is their sanctuary, too. ~
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