OMB SALERI garden was designed by landscape designer and botanist Andrea Verginella Ph.D., owner of the landscaping company “Natura Mea – Giardino e Paesaggio”. The project is located on the outskirts of the city of Brescia, one of the most industrialized capitals in northern Italy. The surrounding areas are former agricultural lands that have been uncultivated for years due to contamination by PCBs and other persistent pollutants. Paride Saleri, president of the company OMB Saleri, supported the development and implementation of a project that aimed to create a functional tile within the larger mosaic of lands currently undergoing reclamation and environmental redevelopment processes. The garden therefore communicates with the surrounding territory, welcoming spontaneous flora and fauna, transcending the function of a mere decorative element. Regarding the design, the orthogonal lines that rigorously define the spaces in the traditional Italian garden, here curve, develop tensions, chasing each other defining meanings no longer absolute, like that of Euclidean geometric forms, but rather relative to the existing and evolving natural reality, to its shapes, symmetries and asymmetries, recombination and continuous readjustment of structures proper of the biological entities, born and preserved sometimes as an advantageous response to changing environmental conditions, sometimes as harmless vestiges of a distant past. This sinuous formality of paths defines flowerbeds of herbaceous perennials and shrubs both cultivated and spontaneous. Plant selection was driven by both ecological and functional criteria, referring to CSR plants theory (Grime, 1977) to privilege the usage of stress-tolerant and mildly competitors species, leaving enough ecological space to welcome, during the seasons, the vagrant ruderal species scattered by winds and fauna. During the design, the issue of sustainability in garden management was also addressed, favoring techniques and technologies to minimize the environmental impact of future maintenance. The most vigorous invasive competitor weeds are limited by means of mechanical removal. Irrigation is carried out, when possible, with rainwater collected in a large underground water tank and distributed through sub-irrigation. In short, this garden is a multidimensional space in which find expression both the desire to reconnect the area with the surrounding landscape and the evolution of the Italian garden that Verginella tunes to the current frequencies of the emerging need to rethink our a priori and human-centric categories, with which we have interacted with the landscape in the past.
Grime, J.P. (1977). “Evidence for the existence of three primary strategies in plants and its relevance to ecological and evolutionary theory” (PDF). The American Naturalist. 111 (982). University of Chicago Press: 1169–1194.
- Project typology: company garden/park
- Other credits:
Company building project by Gruppo Associato Paterlini – GAP www.gap-bs.it
Pergola by I-Pergola – www.i-pergola.it
- Location of the project
North Italy – Brescia
