ORTO BOTANICO LORENZO ROTA

If you happen to see the lotus flower, the papyrus, the carnivorous sundew in the company of the Madagascar palm, the orobica sanguisorba, the sugar cane, the candelabrum cactus, you are probably in the Botanical Garden of Bergamo. Which is not the Tower of Babel of plants, but rather a small fiefdom of the Kingdom of Plants where representatives of the main categories used by botanists to subdivide the more than 250,000 species on our planet are gathered. In the Botanical Garden of Bergamo, the imprint of man is strong: it is with artifice, study and constant care that the difficult coexistence of the more than 1,200 taxa within an area of only 2,400 square metres is possible. With its demonstrative and evocative character, the Botanical Garden of Bergamo contributes to bringing the public closer to the world of plants and to arousing respect for nature. It carries out conservation activities for endangered plants and carries out projects for the reintroduction of endangered species into the wild. Among the latter, the reintroduction of Osmunda regalis, a fern that the physician and botanist Lorenzo Rota, the first descriptor of Bergamo's flora, had reported in 1853 in Val Calepio and along the Adda river, has been very successful: the fern, which had disappeared in recent decades, was reintroduced in the same places a dozen years ago. The Botanical Garden of Bergamo also exchanges seeds, fruits and spores collected within its premises or in the wild with other botanical gardens. The Botanical Garden of Bergamo is a node of the Network of Botanical Gardens of Lombardy and a member of the BGCI (Botanic Garden Conservation International).