What is it about?
The seasonality of Mediterranean landscapes, indicated by flowering and fruit-bearing indigenous plants, can be traced through textual passages of “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili”. Wood-engraved illustrations of “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili” portray landscapes and plant sketches (e.g. ferns, palms, oaks, cypresses, box trees and foliage of laurel, acanthus, grapevine and ivy), and constitute evidence for plant diversity and natural history, at the end of the fifteenth-century.
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Why is it important?
Literary sources to plants capture customs, beliefs, and traditions of the culture and the time in which they were written. The rediscovery of knowledge that has been preserved in old textual sources and has not yet been fully exploited contributes to a better understanding of human-nature relationships.
Perspectives
Numerous plants have been presented as vehicles for expressing emotions, metaphors and historical knowledge, and have bridged environmental and botanical attributes with cultural components. Indigenous Mediterranean shrubs and herbs, ornamentals and fruitbearing trees are the most frequently cited. International biodiversity awareness in the context of the threat presented by climate change heightens the interest in Mediterranean landscapes.
Professor Sophia Rhizopoulou
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Fascinating landscapes of “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili”: source for research of plant diversity, horticulture and culture, Acta Horticulturae, December 2017, International Society for Horticultural Science (ISHS),
DOI: 10.17660/actahortic.2017.1189.3.
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