In Eastern Sicily there is a beautiful place nestled in a suggestive setting between Etna and the Ionian Sea. This beautiful place is Radicepura, an horticultural park still growing and greening, including naturalness and eco-friendly innovation. Just defining Radicepura as a multipurpose space is reducing: it is a water and energy self-sufficient park and a research,training and congress center. More than 5 hectares and over than 3000 species, the Seed Bank, the event spaces, the rainwater harvesting and irrigation: all of these features make Radicepura an unique place and a centre of excellence for researches, landscapers and garden designers.
The main feature of the Radicepura multipurpose park is to be a living nature archive. Hundreds of bushes, flowers, rare palms, medicinal and aromatic plants create the nursery garden, which should stand as a starting point hint for the protection of Mediterranean biodiversity.
Radicepura, indeed, is still growing his green areas and nine new gardens will be opened in 2017. These new gardens will be the living green areas of Radicepura: the first green area will be a natural landscape, a real living archive holding didactic, scientific and experimental gardens; the second one will be an artificial landscape for research and training holding bothanical collection and water, artificial, temporary and innovative gardens.
n 2017 it will also rise the Radicepura Garden Festival. This garden Mediterranean showcase is inspired by the renowned Chelsea Flower Show and by all the English garden festival: expositions held to celebrate the arts of gardening, garden design, landscaping and landscape architecture. The Mediterranean is an unique area, a rich territory including old traditions and new innovations. It’s the epitome of an attractive environment for its concentration of biodiversity and its particular physical and climatic features. The goal of Radicepura Garden Festival is to fulfill an attractive green hub for the Mediterranean and also to have a catalytic role for sustainable tourism. English garden festivals, as the well-known Chelsea Flower Show or Cardiff Flower Show, attract, indeed, thousand of visitors and in 2015 it attracted record crowds with more than 24,000 visitors from across the UK.
Furthermore, Radicepura Garden Festival aims to change people’s perception of the potential for and the application of green, by communicating and interpreting gardening concepts through the use of art and storytelling as well as living up to its mission to take a pivotal role in local regeneration. It will demonstrate that sustainability is not about deprivation, it is about good business practice and the citizenship values of the future.