GIARDINO BOTANICO ANDRÉ HELLER / GARDONE RIVIERA
A garden can be a place of both aesthetic pleasure and of practical use.
To have access to a garden to sit in, to stroll through and to smell the flowers in, is to engage in the aesthetic dimensions of a garden.
But as long as there have been gardens, there have been people who have used it to grow vegetables, fruits, berries and herbs, making the garden space useful as well as beautiful.
Both of these aspects are part of the raison d’être of gardens, simply called “the good life”:
Gardens, regardless of size or form, have the potential to make everyday life both more pleasant and more nutritious.
Even though the Gardone Riviera-garden today is known around the world as Giardino Botanico Fondazione André Heller,
it was not André Heller who originally planned the garden, but Arturo Hruska, an Austrian dentist, who could count the last Russian Tsar, Sigmund Freud, King Alfred of Belgium and Pope Pius XII among his clients.
Hruska was also a dedicated botanist, who began creating his garden already in the 1910s.
He would continue to collect and cultivate many species on the grounds of his villa, organizing the garden – which was initially terraced to vineyards – into smaller sections: a dense forest of bamboo, Japanese ponds, streams and waterfalls, even alpine plants in small ravines.
The garden was already during Hruska’s time one of the largest and most biodiverse of all gardens of Italy, in total encompassing an area of 10, 000 m².
“‘I cultivate my garden, and my garden cultivates me.”
In 1971, Hruska passed away, and for more than ten years, the garden was not tended to, slowly becoming overgrown and forgotten. In 1988, Austrian artist and poet Heller purchased the estate, and began transforming the garden into its current form, planned as a meeting-point between nature and art.
Today, the garden includes approximately 30 modern sculptures by internationally renowned artists, such as Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, Rudolf Hirt, Fernand Léger, Joan Mirò and Auguste Rodin.
On colourful benches strategically place around the park, words of garden-wisdom are painted, reminding the visitor of the cultural significance of gardens:
“Life begins the day you start a garden”; “I cultivate my garden, and my garden cultivates me” and “Gardens are one of the forms of dreams”.
“The garden is home to around 3,000 plant species from all over the world.”
Today, the garden is home to around 3,000 plant species from all over the world, cared for by the garden’s new owners, Jovanka and Hans Porsche.
It is open to the public from March to October, every day from 9 am to 7 pm.
