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| From the botanical garden to the Mediterranean forest |
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It was my grandfather Arturo who had come up with the idea of the Hruska Botanical Garden in Gardone Riviera. As children we were sent from Milan to the lake, knowing well we’d be able to escape the watchful eyes of the adults and our nanny.
In the garden there were streams; the sound of the water was continuous and gentle, in certain points gurgling, then flowing, and then falling into the pond. There the tadpoles gathered, black as velvet.
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The scent of the laurel tree was very strong in the summer heat, and the rocky garden with its alpine botanical specimens was steep and pink; to us children it seemed enormous, as big as a real mountain.
The setting was totally different from the surrounding landscape of Lake Garda.
And it was there that I discovered the allure of the trails.
Time passed, and the garden of my grandfather whom I had loved and had to forget wasn’t missed, but his presence in my unconscious memory remained in the sensations I had felt and experienced.
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Here in the Alta Maremma, the place has not transformed its use, like the garden in Gardone, originally an olive grove. Instead, the task involved recovering a rural area of no logistical importance that was in a total state of abandon. (2011-2012).
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| Vineyards and olive trees, vestiges of ancient cultivations enveloped into the wilderness, appeared in the woods that had been overcome with bramble bushes and clematis vitalba. |
| Here and there dry stone walls exposed by the clearing of thick underbrush revealed a classic terrace cultivation; stretches of mule tracks came into sight, mysterious as artifacts from an earlier time vanished from the memory of the current inhabitants. |
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Our intention was not to deforest or plant new crops, but to create a topography of an imaginary park; to renew the outline of the area, to give it an aesthetic sense: in the sense of directions, a HIGH and LOW, a FORWARD
and BACK, bringing it back into being from the Nothing into which it had sunk.
Creating one thing out of it by evoking another. |
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| Olimpia Hruska |
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