TORREYA 



Vol. 29 No. 2 



March-April, 1929 



The Botanical Garden at Rio de Janeiro 



By Norman Taylor 

 Brooklyn Botanic Garden 



Amid a setting of unparalled grandeur the Botanical Garden 

 at Rio de Janeiro contains one of the greatest outdoor col- 

 lections of tropical plants in the world. Rio itself is a magic 

 city huddled between the great mountains that fringe the bay 

 and the sea. Up these mountains funiculars creep to dizzy 

 heights and between two of them a cableway passenger basket 

 swings crazily hundreds of feet in the air. The city is squeezed 

 among these cliff-like mountains or sprawls up the sides of 

 those with a gentle enough slope to permit building. 



There are very few such gentle slopes, most of the hills 

 having precipitous cliffs on one or two sides, and Corcovada 

 (the Hunchback) has a sheer drop of 1200 feet on the side 

 facing one of the uncomparably blue bays of Rio's much divided 

 and almost lake-like harbor. Corcovada itself is over 2000 

 feet high and nature seems to have spent herself in throwing 

 up many other peaks close by which shut in a comparatively 

 small flat area between them and the sea. 



It is in this area, and with this quite overpowering setting 

 that the Botanical Garden was placed, first as the Jardim 

 Fluminensis, in 1806, and years later as the Jardim Botanico. 

 On two sides of it the forest creeps down to the very edge of 

 the garden, and from the top of Corcovado, the highest peak 

 in Rio, appears to be pushing the garden into the bay. On the 

 other sides there is that vague air of squalor or cheap buildings 

 quite reminding one of the "Botanic" garages, cigar stands and 

 pharmacies that have spawned freely enough on the edges of 

 the botanical gardens in Brooklyn and New York. 



The dominant feature of Rio's garden is a long central 

 path fringed by immense royal palms {Oreodoxa regia: I use 

 their catalog nomenclature). Far to the end of this vista is a 

 small Greek Temple erected to the goddess of palms. From the 



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