Gardone Riviera’s Agave Flowering Marks End of a Botanical Era
Joy and regret in Gardone Riviera for the flowering of a “historic” agave in the Hruska botanical garden, today “Fondazione Heller”. It is the enormous “Agave americana”, of Mexican origin, located in the “upper” part of the park, in front of a small English lawn that nearly serves as a pedestal for it.
The flowering will be the plant’s last, emotional act of vitality, admired and photographed annually by thousands of visitors. Agaves, in fact, bloom only once after 10-40 years of life, then they die. The Gardone agave has certainly been there for over thirty years, most likely reaching forty: it was mentioned in one of the last censuses carried out by Arturo Hruska, the Czechoslovak-born dentist with a hobby in botany who built the park between 1903 and 1971.
The Process of Flowering and Its Characteristics
The flower has sprouted in recent days, but the flowering process will be very slow. For now, there is only the shoot—a kind of enormous asparagus emerging from the large basal tuft of fleshy, spiny leaves.
“The flowering,” explains the Gardone botanist Piercarlo Belotti, “will reach its peak in the middle of summer, in July. The yellowish flowers will appear as a large panicle at the top of a long scape protruding from the leaf tuft. They are rich in nectar and highly visited by insects. The plant’s decline will be a slow process, lasting about a year, after which the agave will have completed its natural vegetative cycle.”
The Agave americana is very common in Italy, especially along the coastal areas, but that of the botanical garden is certainly one of the most long-lived and significant specimens to admire.
The Botanical Heritage and Present Species
Obviously, this is not the only “gem” of the Fondazione Heller, one of the few examples in northern Italy of a large-interest private garden developed within a relatively small space: 8,500 square meters housing an enormous plant heritage. In 1986, a census conducted by Prof. Belotti yielded the following results: 58 trees, 118 shrubs, 22 climbers, 275 perennial herbs, 15 annual herbs, 4 palms, 18 ferns, and about twenty various hybrids.
The collection includes numerous species representing the most varied climatic zones of the planet: hundreds from Europe and Asia, dozens from the Americas, Africa, and Australia. A collection more unique than rare in Northern Italy.
The Metasequoia and Other Examples of Botanical Rarities
Among many plants, perhaps the most famous is the “Metasequoia glyptostroboides”, a specimen of a large tree whose fossilized seeds were found in China in 1945. Seven years later, Dr. Hruska acquired a sapling of this botanical rarity, planting it in his garden, trusting in the mild climate of Garda and the care of Angiolino Amati, the faithful gardener.
The result of many efforts now stretches its powerful branches toward the sky. Alongside botanical interests, the garden also features artistic ones. The owner, the Austrian artist André Heller, while continuing to care for the botanical heritage (which is also protected by the garden’s status as a protected site under ministerial restrictions), has chosen to place contemporary sculptures by artists such as Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, and Mimmo Paladino among the garden’s botanical settings.