Garden realized at the Radicepura Festival – April 2025
Activity: On-site assistance
PLANTS AS WITNESSES OF HISTORY
When we began constructing this garden, I was fully immersed in the daily activities on site: marking, coordinating, measuring, reading plans, and understanding the materials. It was my first on-site project, and my main goal was to learn and give my best. At that moment, all focus was on the “doing”: following levels, placing structures, assisting with planting. There was little room to step back and observe the whole.
Only once the work was finished—two months later, and even more so after reading the text by the designer Nicolas Roth, a landscape architect and scholar with a PhD from Harvard—did I begin to grasp the deeper meaning of that garden.
Telling the story of Afghanistan through plants
The project stems from a remarkable research approach: to convey Afghanistan’s botanical identity not through floristic maps, but through photographs taken during the conflicts that have marked the country. In those often dramatic images, Nicolas recognized signs of life—plants that had survived in landscapes wounded by years of instability. Despite never having visited Afghanistan, he managed to reconstruct a mosaic of environments and species, giving them form and voice within a garden.
A dialogue between common and rare species
Today, walking among the terraces cultivated with scented geranium (Pelargonium graveolens), chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum), grapevine (Vitis vinifera), damask and musk roses (Rosa damascena and Rosa moschata), almond (Prunus dulcis), and then moving towards the wilder plants—the Mazari palm (Nannorrhops ritchiana), Himalayan cedar (Cedrus deodara), tamarisk (Tamarix hispida)—I perceive an ongoing dialogue. The plants are there, with their meanings and interrelations.
One of the things that struck me most was the coexistence of familiar and unfamiliar, common and rare species. The Mazari palm (Nannorrhops ritchiana), little cultivated and almost unknown in Europe, grows spontaneously alongside Salvia yangii. This pairing tells of invisible kinships, of shared geographies that endure over time.
Designing with a fresh perspective
On site, none of this was yet visible. But today, walking through that garden, I perceive a sense of peace and continuity. This experience has expanded the way I look at plants. It has shown me that plants can be true witnesses of the landscape: capable of enduring the passage of time, adapting, surviving. And in their persistence, they reveal layers of memory, culture, and history.
As a designer, I now carry this additional perspective with me: a gaze that seeks, in every plant, its past, its memory, its voice in telling the story of the place. Because creating a garden also means this: guiding living presences to become part of a landscape that speaks.
