"...mein Acker ist die Zeit", Aufsätze zur Umweltgeschichte - Oapen

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rational education. Furthermore, the still lifes of market scenes, with their plethora
of dead game, flowers, vegetables, and fruits, taught beholders about the inexhaustible
world of nature “outside”. 218
Although not yet studied, the flowerpot must be an invention of the city. It enables
residents to grow plants (for whatever reason) on a minute piece of soil. Easily
brought inside the house, the flowerpot requires architectural prerequisites,
mainly bigger and more translucent windows. One aspect of the flowerpot is the
winter garden built in civic houses, which echo the stately orangery. Thus the
flower pot might be taken as a metaphor for the secularized and democratised
share of ordinary people in the ornamental beauty of nature. Or it simply functions
as the self-assurance of living in a humane place (in terms of the idea of “phytophilia”).
From the beginning of the nineteenth century, there has been a tendency to
transform former horticultural plots within cities into areas for recreation. However,
recreation by resting and rejoicing in the colorfulness of flowers in the backyard
can be traced back to medieval times. It is not by chance that the ideas of the
“hortus conclusus” and the “locus amoenus” have a considerable overlap. From the
beginning of the nineteenth century, the allotment garden movement (“Schreber-
Garten”) started its triumphal procession through many European cities, and an
allotment is still an object of desire for many city residents. Any suburb settlement
follows basically this principle. It should not be overlooked that many of these
small plots contributed considerably to the nourishment of city residents during
periods of food shortage, a structural problem that cities have to face from time to
time. A related aspect of “displaced nature” is the gradual but increasing reduction
of seasonal differences in cities (as compared with the countryside) and the generation
of a specific climate (the heat island phenomenon).
I end this section ex negativo by mentioning the importance of “nature” outside
of the city. Social control and restrictions within cities may be so stressing that
residents search for relief by “going into the nature”. The entity “nature” stands as
a synonym for a place without (or almost without) any human rules. Here the
meaning of “nature” falls back on its antique understanding as: the “chaos”, nature
free of rules that man once had to arrange. After thousands of years of arrangements
and regulations, this arranged and regulated caricature of “nature” is called
on because it is misunderstood as being a curing wilderness. As one consequence,
a provocative question arises: is “nature”, at least in some respects, an invention of
city residents?
218 I am referring specifically to Dutch, Flemish and Upper German still-lifes of the sixteenth century
which have been studied with respect to “biodiversity”. From a broad variety of publications I mention
specifically A.C.Zeven and W.A. Brandenburg, “Use of paintings from the 16 th to 19 th centuries
to study the history of domesticated plants”, Economic Botany 40(1986), pp. 397 – 408; Mirella Levi
D’Ancona, Lo Zoo del Rinascimento. Il significato degli animali nella pittura italiana dal xiv al xvi secolo, (Lucca:
Maria Pacini Pazzi,2000); Sam Segal, Flowers and Nature: Netherlandish Flower Painting of Four Centuries.
(The Hague: SDU Publ. 1990)