Fem kontinenter: En resa genom vår planets växtlighet

Originaltext på engelska:

Five continents: A journey through the plants of the planet.

Between Pontinia and Priverno, in the Amaseno river valley, Antonio Aumenta, one of the most important Italian nurserymen, has created a very rich collection of plants, inspired by the five continents and the biodiversity of our planet.

In 16 hectares, Antonio has reconstructed the wild and wonderful nature of our Earth using thousands of different species of huge, grandiose but also rare plants.

To obtain this homage to the nursery culture he took many years of research all over the world.

Each curve, each hill hides the next environment and so the park winds through a succession of landscapes, groves, clearings, deserts and compositions of colorful flowers and exotic scents that seem to never end.

Antonio says that since he was a child, he has always tried to pay tribute to beauty by carefully choosing the wildflowers to bring to the teacher or to his mother.

This love of research and beauty led him to travel the world not only in search of the most beautiful plants but also for the habitat, the environment from which they come.

He collected thousands and thousands of plants which he then placed on this hill creating the park of the five continents. His idea was to recreate the landscape and vegetation of distant countries and to allow visitors to travel across the five continents in a matter of hours.

To ensure that the setting was as truthful as possible, Antonio even imported boulders from the Mexican desert, sand and earth from the Australian continent and millenary plants, more unique than rare, with which he recreated rain forest and desert landscapes.

Each step taken transports you to distant countries with its most extraordinary plants. In area that recreate the North American landscape there are water hyacinths and the very tall Sequoia Gigantea, the biggest tree in nature; in the central-southern one the visitor can admire the splendid Chorisia Speciosa with its trunk covered with enormous quills and from which the kapok (one of the lightest textile fibers) is obtained.

In the area dedicated to Asia, the protagonists are ornamental flowering cherry trees and oriental maples; and finally, in the part dedicated to Europe, a tribute was paid to the olive tree. A fundamental plant in the history of our continent to which a colossal and very suggestive amphitheater with stones and centenary olive trees has been dedicated.

During this walk it seems to take an imaginary path that from the sunny desert takes you to immerse yourself in the atmosphere swollen with smells of an ancient Japanese garden.

In all this there is all the wisdom of experience but above all a dose of childish madness of this wise and curios man.

About the author:

She was born in Florence in 1971. For a long part of her life, she was a professional dancer and a choreographer, but when she visited the Garden of Ninfa in 2009, she felt in love with it and she started to learn as much as she could about Italian and European gardens.

She is married with Davide, an ITAF pilot and she has a beautiful daughter, Vittoria and she is always looking forward for every new adventure that her life will bring to her.