rss_2.0Sciendo RSS Feed for Gardens and Landscapes of Portugalhttps://sciendo.com/journal/GLPhttps://www.sciendo.comhttps://sciendo-parsed.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/6471e102215d2f6c89db3d77/cover-image.jpghttps://sciendo.com/journal/GLP140216https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2024-0007ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2024-00072025-01-09T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2024-0005<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>From the perspective of the history of science and technology, this article explores the reasons that lie behind the choice of the Serra da Arrábida, located on the Setúbal Peninsula south of Lisbon, for the settlement of a longstanding religious community. It argues that the biophysical characteristics of the landscape’s southern slope subunit, and the cultural meaning and historical evolution of the landscape, fostered the establishment of a convent as well as of a spiritual <italic>desertum</italic>.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2024-00052025-01-09T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2024-0002<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Nowadays, the concept of environment is commonly used, both in scientific speech or in more mundane realms, such as in political or economic issues. However, this conceptualization of the environment, as something singular and abstract with which organisms continuously interact, was not known until the middle of the nineteenth century. This concept was coined and emphasized by Herbert Spencer, who primarily inherited the idea that organisms are constantly affected by their external circumstances firstly from Lamarck, and then Charles Lyell, Alexander von Humboldt, and especially Auguste Comte. From Lamarck, who was influenced by Cuvier and Buffon, Spencer received the idea of a physicochemical environment sustaining life. With Humboldt and Lyell, Spencer became progressively aware of the relevance of other living beings in defining a specific organism’s environment. With Comte, Spencer encountered the idea of a correspondence between organism and environment, in which the latter was abstractly regarded. Consequently, Spencer would include physical, biological, and social circumstances under the umbrella of this abstraction. Darwin would also contribute to this perspective on environment while highlighting the idea of “struggle for existence”, in which a new ecological stance, focused on the interdependence of organisms, was brought to the fore. My aim is to outline the history of the progressive concealment of elements of the external world surrounding an organism, which was involved in this continuous metaphysical abstraction of the concept of environment. Only then, I argue, did it become possible to construct a dichotomy between organism and environment, and conceptualize their interaction, crucial aspects in the history of ecology.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2024-00022025-01-09T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2024-0006<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This article aims to discuss the issue of political agency in the context of the climate crisis. In this regard, the article reports and analyzes the outlines of the debate on the relationship between human beings and the non-human world, and takes Bruno Latour’s theoretical proposal and some criticisms of it as a reference. For the most part, this debate revolves around ontological questions concerning the status of human beings in the world. Such questions provide arguments for better understanding whether politics represents an autonomous dimension in which human agency possesses a peculiar meaning or not.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2024-00062025-01-09T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2024-0004<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This article examines the olive tree as an aspect of the Portuguese landscape. After considering the notion of landscape as a concept, it traces references to olive tree cultivation and olive oil production, particularly within the Iberian context, from Antiquity through the twenty-first century. It argues that these practices form an important and understudied in the history of knowledge transmission, particularly what has been lately termed “artisanal knowledge.” It likewise points to the potential present-day value of recovering traditional practices for the future of industries connected to the olive tree in Portugal.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2024-00042025-01-09T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2024-0001ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2024-00012025-01-09T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2024-0003<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This paper proposes that lake ecosystems have historically provided fertile ground for the advancement of ecological concepts. It argues that foundational ecological ideas, such as ecosystems and the organism-environment relationship, have their roots in limnology, the scientific study of lakes. In other words, these concepts were developed by approaching lake ecosystems as primitive ecological models. To illustrate this point, it examines the scientific endeavors of François Forel (1841-1912) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Stephen Forbes (1844-1930) in Illinois and Wisconsin, United States. Both were pioneering figures for the development of the limnological or, even more broadly, the ecological discipline. Curiously, they contemporaneously developed their respective scientific accounts in two different scientific traditions.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2024-00032025-01-09T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2021-0004<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>The exploration of the Nabão River in Tomar, Portugal, and its resources was an exclusive right of the Order of Christ, and it was constantly evoked by the religious of this order when there were disputes over the right to build water wheels, mills, and other structures along the river. This singular relation of power over the territory led to also a unique urban occupation in the Portuguese panorama. These interactions of power were documented in the unpublished manuscript of “Bernardo Daniel de Moraes’ Requirement” of the year 1799. The manuscript allows to cross boundaries between the political, economic and social context and the Order of Christ and their impact on the use of the Nabão River. Therefore, with this document as main source for this paper, we seek to demonstrate the relations between industrial activity, the Nabão River and the development of the city of Tomar in the turn to the nineteenth century, having the Order of Christ as a constant and structuring element in this gear.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2021-00042022-01-18T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2021-0007ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2021-00072022-01-18T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2021-0003<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This investigation deals about one of the most unique constructions in the Aranjuez hydraulic engineering program. The <italic>Azuda</italic>, a waterwheel, was built in the middle of the eighteenth century in an area close to the Renaissance canal of the Embocador. First, a spatial and chronological analysis of its construction process and its typology which combines a wheel and an aqueduct, is carried out. Next, it is contextualized in the cultural tradition of the Mediterranean norias and its functions are clarified as it covered both irrigation and recreation. Finally, it is argued how the cultural landscape of Aranjeuz was enriched with a work of great aesthetic value, with classical and Muslim roots, being reinterpreted under the spirit of the Enlightenment.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2021-00032022-01-18T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2021-0001ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2021-00012022-01-18T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2021-0005<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>The gardens of the National Palace of Queluz, built in the eighteenth century, are supplied by a complex branched water supply system. The aim of the current research is to analyse the hydraulic behaviour of the pressurised supply systems, namely the water pathways, the available pressure-head at the fountains and the water consumption at the gardens, by means of computational simulation for different operating scenarios. Results show that the difference of elevation was sufficient to assure the water transport by gravity from the surrounding water sources to the ornamental fountains, cascades and lakes and to provide 8-12 m water jets. Several scenarios are analysed showing that the fountains and cascades water consumption are in the range of 12.4 to 42.2 L/s, available water sources are enough to satisfy these demands for several hours per day and the two existing tanks, Curro and Miradouro, have sufficient capacity to store water to be used in the ornamental fountains and cascades and in the irrigation of the botanical garden and the horticultural area.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2021-00052022-01-18T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2021-0002<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>In the context of the history of science and technology, the article explores the use of tide force in the Tagus estuary, more precisely in the municipality of Seixal, from the tide mills in the early modern period to the project of the hydraulic motor in the nineteenth century. The historical knowledge of practices and devices for the intelligent use of water in Seixal is an invitation to current reflection on the use of clean and renewable energies.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2021-00022022-01-18T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2021-0006ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2021-00062022-01-18T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2019-0010<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title><p>The article investigates Renaissance naturalists’ views on the links between plants and places where they grow. It looks at the Renaissance culture of botanical excursions and observation of plants in their natural environment and analyses the methods Renaissance naturalists used to describe relations between plants and their habitat, the influence of location on plants’ substantial and accidental characteristics, and in defining species. I worked mostly with printed sixteenth-century botanical sources and paid special attention to the work of Italian naturalist Giambattista Della Porta (1535–1615), whose thoughts on the relationship between plants and places are original, yet little known.</p></abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2019-00102019-12-11T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2019-0009<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title><p>European dried gardens from the 16th century have been traditionally associated with the emergence of early modern botany and its relation to the traditional genre of pharmacopeias. This study reviews a sample of the 37 known exemplars of these bound collections and argues that the design and development of these herbaria or dried gardens (<italic>orti sicci</italic>), as they were also known, reveal a broader set of questions on nature and about the relationships of humans with the natural world than the ones with which they have been linked. Based on the evidence of a diverse corpus of dried gardens—some richly bound, others composed over recycled paper, some with copious annotations, others with a seemingly random layout and distribution of plants—, this paper argues for a comparative reading of these books as a corpus that contributed significantly to early modern natural history and philosophy.</p></abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2019-00092019-12-11T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2019-0008ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2019-00082019-12-11T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2019-0013ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2019-00132019-12-11T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2019-0012ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2019-00122019-12-11T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2019-0011<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title><p>The first two public gardens in Bucharest, as well as some of the oldest in the South and East regions of nowadays country of Romania, were designed, built and planted around the mid-nineteenth century by a German-born landscape gardener named Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Meyer. These two public gardens were designed according to modern nineteenth century landscaping concepts and were planted with exotic species of flowers, shrubs and trees not common at that time either in Bucharest or anywhere in the Romanian provinces south or east of the Carpathians. To better understand the design, development, and meaning of these gardens, this paper aims to analyze the specific palette of ornamental species of plants and the planting patterns that were used for the Kiseleff and Cișmigiu gardens in Bucharest and to outline the importance of their use.</p></abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/glp-2019-00112019-12-11T00:00:00.000+00:00en-us-1