Buenos Aires Botanical Garden

Listen for a moment. Just beyond the iron railings, buses brake and horns sound around Plaza Italia. Inside, the noise softens into something else: gravel under your shoes, leaves moving overhead, and the smell of damp earth after the sprinklers. Within a few steps, one of the busiest corners of Buenos Aires gives way to green shade. Welcome to the Buenos Aires Botanical Garden, a living collection of plants in the middle of the Palermo district.

The garden carries the name of the man who shaped it: Carlos Thays. He was a French landscape architect, born in Paris, who came to Argentina in the late nineteenth century. He became the city's director of parks and walks. In that role he designed or redesigned many of the green spaces that people in Buenos Aires still use every day. This garden was one of his most personal projects, and it opened to the public in 1898.

Thays did not simply design the garden from a distance. He lived here. The red brick house near the main entrance, built in an English country style, served as his family home. Today it holds the garden's offices and sometimes exhibitions. Take a moment to look at it. It is unusual to stand in a public garden and see the house of the person who planned every path around you.

Now, here is something many visitors miss. The garden is not one single design. Thays planned it as several gardens side by side, each following a different tradition. There is a formal French section with symmetry and clipped order. There is a Roman section, with plants the ancient Romans knew. There is an Oriental section with plants from Asia. As you walk, try to notice the moment when one style ends and the next begins.

The Roman garden holds one of the most surprising works of art in the city. Look for a large bronze group called Saturnalia, by the Italian sculptor Ernesto Biondi. It shows a Roman festival in full disorder: figures drinking, dancing, and falling over each other. The sculpture caused discussion when it arrived, because it was so frank. Today it sits quietly among the trees, and pigeons often rest on the shoulders of its celebrating figures.

There is another layer to the plan, and this one is more scientific. Part of the garden is arranged by plant families. Related species grow near each other, so a student can walk from one branch of the botanical family tree to the next. Small labels near many plants give the scientific name and the region of origin. A botanical garden is a library first, and a park second. These labels are its catalogue cards.

Then there is the section for Argentina itself. Here, plants are grouped by the regions and provinces of the country, from the dry northwest to the humid northeast and the cold south. In a short walk, you cross a nation of very different landscapes. Look for the palo borracho, the silk floss tree. Its swollen, bottle-shaped trunk is covered in thick thorns. In season, it carries large pink flowers.

Another native tree worth finding is the ombú. It comes from the open grasslands of the pampas. Strictly speaking, the ombú is not a true tree but a giant herb, and its wood is soft and full of water. Its wide base spreads across the ground like folded roots. In the countryside, its shade was a meeting point on flat land with few other trees. Gaucho songs and stories often mention it.

Now turn your attention to the glass. The garden's greenhouses are among its most loved structures. The largest is a delicate building of iron and glass, made in France in the Art Nouveau style. Art Nouveau was a design movement from around 1900 that used curved lines and forms taken from nature. Popular accounts say this greenhouse was shown at a Paris exhibition before it travelled across the Atlantic. Stand close and look at the thin iron frame against the sky.

For many years, the garden was also known for another kind of resident: cats. Large colonies lived among the bushes and benches, fed by neighbours and visitors. For locals, they became part of the place. In more recent years, the city worked to reduce the colonies and find homes for many of the animals, partly to protect birds and plants. You may still meet a cat or two. But the garden today belongs more clearly to its plants.

And to its birds. Stay still for a minute, and you will start to hear them. Green parakeets argue in the high branches. Rufous horneros, the national bird of Argentina, build round nests of mud that look like small clay ovens. Their name comes from the Spanish word for oven. If you see a brown, dome-shaped nest on a branch or a lamppost, you are looking at the work of a hornero.

The garden also shows the rhythm of the seasons in a southern city. In spring, which here begins in September, the paths fill with flowers and new leaves. In late spring, purple jacaranda blossoms cover the streets of Palermo. In autumn, around April and May, the light turns golden and leaves gather under the benches. Each visit gives a slightly different garden, because a botanical collection never stands still. It grows, flowers, drops seed, and starts again.

As you finish, walk back toward the gate slowly. Notice the people around you. An office worker eats lunch on a bench. A student sketches a leaf. An older couple walks the same path they may have walked for decades. Then step out into the traffic of Plaza Italia. The city returns at full volume. But for a few minutes more, you may still carry the smell of earth and the quiet of the trees with you.