Real Jardín Botánico

This guide to the Real Jardín Botánico in Madrid opens in 1789, when a package of unpromising dried cuttings arrived from Mexico City for the garden's director, the priest and botanist Antonio José Cavanilles, and one of them flowered. It follows how Cavanilles named the new plant after Swedish botanist Anders Dahl and mailed tubers to gardens in Paris, Montpellier and Kew, and how King Charles III's stepped terraces along the Paseo del Prado, laid out by Sabatini and Villanueva, still shape the garden today. Listen for how war and a nineteenth-century cyclone nearly erased what Cavanilles started.