It has become little of a recurring feature on this trip, my visits to the botanic gardens in the cities I go to. Amsterdam’s Hortus Botanicus became my fourth.
Hortus Botanicus started as an herb garden for doctors and apothecaries in 1638. Today it has a tightly planted, wide selection of trees, a couple of great green houses and, most importantly, a butterfly house! You who have followed me since my Bolivia trip ages ago, know that I love photographing butterflies – almost more than I love taking pictures of flowers.
A Zebra Heliconian.
A Flying Dutchman.
A monster moth, hiding behind a bush.
But, of course, there were other things worth seeing in the garden. A tiny Giant Sequoia, for example. Kind of a joke, really, compared to the real ones up in the Californian mountains.
Insect eating flowers. Dangerous stuff, in its own way. And beautiful.
What made me find the garden was the posters that were put up all over town, advertising a photo exhibition at the garden. Turns out the exhibition was a couple of photograph by different artists, hung up in the old palm house. And to be hones, the only of the photos that were really worth seeing were these two x-ray images. Really cool, in my opinion.
They had three pretty new, really nice greenhouses as well, with subtropic, tropic and arid climates. I like the smell in greenhouses. It tastes clean, somehow.
It was a small botanic garden, Hortus Botanicus, and the forested parts of it were quite wild. But being more or less in the middle of the city, it made a really nice respite in the intense city architecture. Some green for the eyes. I liked it. Especially the butterfly house.
Katja Malmborg 