𝗨𝗻𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗼𝗼𝘁𝘀: 𝗿𝗲𝗳𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗯𝗼𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗸𝗶𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗮𝗰𝗿𝗼𝘀𝘀 𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲

I came to Prague for the architecture and the coffee. I left humbled by the quiet brilliance of its plants.

It wasn’t that I expected nothing—I knew the city had botanical gardens. But I didn’t expect to be so moved. I didn’t expect to walk into glasshouses and dry gardens and parterres and feel as though I was both in a foreign land and right at home.

At the Troja Botanical Gardens, I found myself staring, transfixed, at combinations of Berberis, Picea, and grasses that would be just as at home in an English border as they were in that Czech slope. A ringed dry garden filled with sculptural planting sat still and poetic in the afternoon sun. In the rainforest glasshouse, Fata Morgana, I wandered under tropical vines and beside reflective pools, surrounded by the echoes of plant worlds from Africa, Asia, and South America. The attention to geographical grouping, to atmosphere, to sensory immersion – it was both science and theatre.

But it wasn’t the exotic that struck me most.

It was the familiar.

There were salvias. Digitalis. Penstemon. Stipa tenuissima. Lamium. Carex. Roses everywhere. Hydrangeas. Geraniums. Even under different skies and different regimes, across borders and histories, the plants we reach for as designers and gardeners are often the same.

They are the ones that speak of resilience, of grace in movement, of soft colour and long bloom. The ones that tie us together.

This sense of unity made me think more deeply about the role of botanical gardens in Europe—not just as places of beauty, but as quiet, persistent sanctuaries of scientific curiosity. In Prague, I felt that history palpably. Charles University, one of the oldest in Europe, fostered a tradition of botanical exploration that continued even through the grey decades of the Soviet bloc. Gardens weren’t neglected; they were shielded. Research didn’t die; it went underground and re-emerged.

It reminds me how precious these institutions are. And how much they offer us, not just as designers or scientists, but as humans trying to make sense of continuity and change.

I sometimes share these reflections on Instagram or Facebook. The algorithms prefer videos of cats or makeup tips. A single rose post might get a like from my daughter, a heart from my sister. But I share them anyway. Because someone else might pause, somewhere, and wonder at the quiet continuity of salvia.

Designing gardens is, at its heart, a form of translation. We take the universal and make it personal. We use the vocabulary of the earth and rewrite it in our own dialect.

Prague reminded me why I design. And what a gift it is to feel at home among plants, wherever you go.