PLANTS AS WITNESSES OF HISTORY
DATE: April 2025
ROLE: On-site assistance during the construction of The Garden of the Mazari Palm by Nicolas Roth, at the Radicepura Mediterranean Garden Festival Biennale.
NARRATIVE:
When we began building this garden, I was fully absorbed in the daily rhythms of the site: marking, coordinating, measuring, reading drawings, and understanding the materials. It was my first hands-on project, and my main goal was to learn and give my best. At that moment, all my focus was on doing: following the earthworks, assisting with the planting. There was little space to pause and see the bigger picture.
Only upon completion—two months later, and even more so after reading the notes of the designer Nicolas Roth, a landscape architect and Harvard PhD—did I begin to grasp the deeper meaning of this garden.
Telling the Story of Afghanistan Through Plants
The project originates from a remarkable research approach: to convey Afghanistan’s botanical identity, not through floristic maps, but through photographs taken during the country’s conflicts. In these often dramatic images, Nicolas recognized traces of life—plants that had survived in landscapes wounded by years of instability. Even without having visited Afghanistan, he reconstructed a mosaic of environments and species, giving them form and voice within a garden.
Photographs courtesy of Nicolas Roth
A Dialogue Between the Familiar and the Rare
Today, walking among the cultivated terraces of scented pelargonium (Pelargonium graveolens), chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum), grapevine (Vitis vinifera), damask and musk roses (Rosa damascena and Rosa moschata), almond (Prunus dulcis), and then moving toward the wilder plants—the Mazari palm (Nannorrhops ritchiana), Himalayan cedar (Cedrus deodara), tamarisk (Tamarix hispida)—I sensed a living dialogue. The plants stand there, carrying their meanings, weaving their relationships.
What struck me most was the coexistence of the well-known and the unfamiliar, the common and the rare. The Mazari palm (Nannorrhops ritchiana), scarcely cultivated and almost unknown in Europe, grows here beside the humble Russian sage (Salvia yangii). This juxtaposition tells of invisible kinships, of shared geographies that endure through time.
Designing with a New Gaze
On the construction site, none of this was yet visible. But today, walking through that garden, I sense peace and continuity. The experience widened my way of seeing plants. It revealed that plants can be true witnesses of history: able to endure the passage of time, to adapt, to survive. And in their persistence, they carry layers of memory, culture, and story.
As a designer, I now carry this gaze with me: a gaze that seeks, in every plant, not only its beauty but also its past, its memory, its voice in the narrative of place. Because creating a garden means this too—guiding living presences to become part of a landscape that tells a story.
