richard deakin - flora of the colosseum

 

i remember a few years back beginning to notice that the old buildings i was going to see weren't actually the same as the buildings described in Romantic literature. more dnagerous perhaps, but overgrown and shrouded in an atmospheric host of plants. it hadn't occurred to me that the colosseum would be exactly the same, nor that someone would have gone over and produced a flora of what was there! i particularly like his notion that specific plants had been transported there in the gut of animals hundreds of years before. as i start the year's botanising here's a nod to richard deakin and, as ever the public domain review, for keeping these things alive