Tuscan Horticulture Society

The Società Toscana di Orticultura - the Tuscan Horticultural Society - was founded in Florence in 1854, seven years before there was an Italy to found it in. It built the Giardino dell'Orticoltura and the great glasshouse that still dominates it, and it is the reason Florence has a plant and flower market in the last week of April and again in early October.

The society began as a question rather than an institution. In 1852 the Accademia dei Georgofili, noticing how much interest new plant introductions and garden management were generating, sent a group of specialists off to find out whether Florence could support a horticultural society. A few successful exhibitions later, with the major Florentine gardens taking part, the Società Toscana di Orticultura was constituted in 1854. It is still going, today as an APS - an Italian non-profit association - with roughly the same brief it started with: spreading the culture and practice of growing things, public and private.

The garden and the Tepidarium

Success created a practical problem. The society needed ground of its own to trial exotic species, choice vegetables and fruit trees. In the late 1850s it acquired land outside Porta San Gallo, in the district then called Pellegrino - the site of today's Giardino dell'Orticoltura, off Via Vittorio Emanuele II north of Piazza della Libertà.

From 1876 the garden was reorganised to host national exhibitions, and in 1880 the Federazione Orticola Italiana chose Florence for the first national horticultural exposition. To do the job properly the society commissioned a tepidarium - a heated iron and glass conservatory - on a scale Italy had not seen. A subscription among members paid for it, the engineer and architect Giacomo Roster (1837-1905), a former collaborator of Giuseppe Poggi, drew it, and the Officine Michelucci of Pistoia built it, with cast-iron columns from the Lorenzetti foundry in the same city.

The result is rectangular, 38.5 meters by 17, covering about 650 square meters, with a central nave roughly 14 meters high. Around 9,700 pieces were assembled on eight tonnes of rolled iron. Inside, heated by stoves for tropical plants, are two basins with niches faced in spongy rockwork by the Florentine carver Francesco Marini - a nod to Mannerist garden grottoes. It opened on May 19, 1880, and La Nazione's reporter called it a crystal palace. It remains the largest iron-and-glass glasshouse in Italy.

The First World War began a long decline in the society's activity, and in 1930 the Comune di Firenze bought the garden and opened it as a public park. The Tepidarium went with it, and the city has been restoring it in fits and starts ever since. It is scheduled to reopen on October 2, 2026, at the opening of the autumn flower show.

What the society does now

Plant and flower markets are the public face of the operation. The society runs them across Tuscany in spring and autumn, drawing on a network of more than 75 growers, nurserymen, fruit specialists and artisan traders from all over Italy. The two Florence editions at the Giardino dell'Orticoltura are the flagships: the spring show opens on April 25 and runs into the first days of May, the autumn show takes the first weekend of October. The society also runs or co-runs Siena in Fiore in the Giardini della Fontana di San Prospero, Greve in Fiore in Piazza Matteotti, Portoferraio in Fiore on Elba, Harborea in Livorno, and Botanica Urbana at the Manifattura Tabacchi.

Each show carries a cultural program alongside the stalls - short botanical courses, artistic workshops, book presentations, talks, guided walks of the garden, and children's activities. These are free, but most require booking, either online or at the society's stand by the Via Vittorio Emanuele II entrance.

Away from the shows the society teaches. Its amateur and professional courses run at its two working sites in Florence, Villa Bardini and the Giardino delle Rose. It also runs F'Orti, a network of community vegetable gardens in the city, and a program of free cultural activities during the Estate Fiorentina.

The library and archive

The serious scholarly asset is at Villa Bardini: a library of more than 5,000 horticultural periodicals from around the world, volumes from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and a historical archive of over 10,000 documents and photographs covering the society from its origins. The holdings are catalogued in the Florentine library system, SDIAF, and can be consulted online.

The society has also published Il Bullettino continuously since 1876. Contributors have included Orazio Fenzi, Baron Ricasoli, Carl Sprenger, Angiolo Pucci, Roster himself, Odoardo Beccari and Pietro Porcinai, which makes the run a primary source on the history of Italian botany and on how the great Italian gardens were made. Articles are indexed online up to 1938. Library and archive visits are by appointment only.

Practical notes for visitors

The Giardino dell'Orticoltura is a public park and free to enter, with a playground, a bar with a terrace, the 1911 Loggetta Bondi by Giuseppe Castellucci, and the dragon staircase climbing to the Orti del Parnaso terrace and its view over the city. It is about a ten minute walk north of Piazza della Libertà; the main entrance is at Via Vittorio Emanuele II 4, with a second at Via Bolognese 17A next to the Tepidarium. This is a neighborhood park rather than a monument, which is much of its appeal.

Time a visit to a show weekend and you get the garden at its best: stalls the length of the avenue, the glasshouse in use, and a local crowd doing its spring plant shopping. Buying is another matter - if you are traveling home outside the EU, plant material is subject to phytosanitary rules and you should assume you cannot take it with you. Seeds, bulbs, tools, books and ceramics travel better.

Anyone who wants to support the society can join it. Membership is annual, costs 20 euro for new members, and brings a 10 percent discount at all the society's markets and at affiliated nurseries, a mailed subscription to Il Bullettino, and invitations to events and courses.

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