ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Cultivating knowledge: ‘Il Giardino Fiorito’ and women’s contributions to botanical worlds in the twentieth century

• In Event: Hidden Botanical Cultures: Networks, Gender, and Exile in the Making of Botany in the Italian Peninsula (18th-20th centuries) | Sponsored by the Italian Society for the History of Science (SISS)

English Abstract

The monthly magazine ‘Il Giardino Fiorito’, founded in Italy in 1931 within the Società Italiana Amici dei Fiori, offers a revealing lens through which to examine the intertwined botanical worlds that shaped twentieth-century Italian knowledge production. Intended to promote interactions between academic botany, professional floriculture, and amateur floriculture, the periodical created a space where heterogeneous contributors could share, discuss, and reconfigure expertise. Through its pages, the circulation of scientific and practical insights, together with living specimens and cultivation practices, crossed social boundaries and linked laboratories, commercial nurseries, and private gardens.

Particular attention will be paid to the participation of women, who played an important role in the magazine’s foundation and editorial work, and were consistently represented among its authors. Il Giardino Fiorito thus provided a distinctive space in which women’s floricultural knowledge, experimental practices, and experiences could be recorded, discussed, and shared.

Situated at the intersection of scientific research, commercial practice, and amateur cultures, the magazine allows analysis of the plural, negotiated, and materially grounded processes through which botanical knowledge was co-produced. Through this case study, the research reveals how botanical knowledge in twentieth-century Italy was produced, circulated, and negotiated across social networks, highlighting the often-hidden contributions of women and their significance in shaping the field.

Author

• Federica Bonacini, Roma Tre University