The research examines, for the first time, how an acclimatization garden, and the planting and design of avenues, riverbanks and arid hills as landscape prototypes provided recreational spaces and served as symbols of power when reflecting a dynamic relationship between botanical practices and political decision-making, while displaying the multiple meanings of landscape as an artificial order and arrangement of nature.

The work unveils the existence of an arboreal culture in Chile’s capital city, one undertaken by a diverse group of city dwellers inadvertently knotting political, economic and social threads in a nascent but influential network that, in the period spanning the 1830s through the 1930s, changed the city’s colonial face and structure by implementing an artificial ensemble of landscape operations that still today define the city.