Into the wild in the middle of Bucharest: the challenges of the Botanical Garden

How the Botanical Garden in Bucharest has managed to survive financial dire straits, intrusive visitors and even bombardments, but still struggles to find its path. A girl wearing a hoodie and colorful trousers rakes up fallen leaves and weeds. She has a serious face, immersed in the music she’s listening to on her headphones. She does her job very rigorously. A few meters away, some boys carry big baskets full of dried branches, leaves, and weeds. You can see them as you drive down the Cotroceni road. On one side of the street there is the Cotroceni Palace, the headquarters of Romania’s president. On the other side, stretching over 17.5 ha, the Botanical Garden. It usually looks empty, but now it’s in a frenzy of people and movement. It’s early April, and more than 200 volunteers have gathered for the weekend to do the spring cleaning in the Botanical Garden in Bucharest. Volunteers have been doing this every spring for the last ten years They move across the garden, with scissors and rakes, leaving behind long stretches of green grass. Most of them are high school and university students, but you can also bump into people in their 40s and 50s raking up, cutting underbrush or picking up leaves. In a strange coincidence, their volunteering day also marks an event from 71 years ago. On April 4, 1944, Anglo-American bombs hit the Garden. The ravages were significant: 500,000 of the 700,000 sheets of the Botanical Garden’s herbarium were destroyed. Apart from that, there is no memory of the war. In nature, history wounds heal the quickest. Another spring, and everything is new.