Mayan ethnobotany in a contemporary landscape

During the Spring semester 2025, the task of the ‹Advanced Studio in Landscape Architecture› offered by the chair of Professor Hubert Klumpner in collaboration with the ‹Chair of Being Alive› is about creating a botanical garden. The studio had the opportunity to travel to Guatemala City and to Andorra on a field trip. Half of the studio went in Andorra and half in Guatemala for a week to visit the two sites. This trip allowed the students to experience the site but also to understand the complex social fabric and to learn more about the local indigenous species. The following lines focus on the part in Guatemala.

The project is part of a collaboration with the ‹Universidad delle Valle de Guatemala› and the group ‹Green Health Initiative›. It is still at the beginning stage and the purpose of the trip is to start a discussion about what could be the future ethnobotanical center. The future center aims to protect and cultivate medical species and also to become an ethnobotanical research center. For the ‹Master in Landscape Architecture› students, the goal is to integrate a botanical garden in that future complex.

In those multi-layered complexities, each student took care of a specific topic for the garden: soil, geology and climate. The topics were also linked with Mayan cosmology, thus resulting into a combination of science, mythology and rituals. By the end most of the topics overlap on each other and each information collected during the week was relevant for the next steps of the studio. The field trip took place in the middle of March during the dry season. The weather conditions were warm but not extreme. The local landscape is impressive and the cultural complexity extremely rich. The country is mostly shaped by ravines and surrounded by volcanos.

The site looks like a land experimentation: patchworks of mono cultural cultivation, forest and traces of burning areas.

The future garden is located in the suburbs of Guatemala City. The site lies within a ravine which makes the access quiet difficult for the topographical conditions; in fact, the steep slopes make it nearly impossible to access in rainy season, where many landslides occur. The site looks like a land experimentation: patchworks of mono cultural cultivation, forest and traces of burning areas could be found on the site. During the trip, the land was sandy and really dry. The country has rainy season and dry season but during the dry season, the question of water is concerning. In fact, the drought is very present in the country and it is therefore difficult to maintain the water table at a decent level to sustain agriculture and avoid wild fire.

During the afternoon on site, we tried to understand the complexities and boundaries of the site but it was hard to capture the whole essence of the site in only one session. The site is large and the topography challenging. During the rainy season, landslide and erosion are an issue. The amount of water received on the land is very high. Nowadays, due to the high rate of evapotranspiration, the land isn’t able to retain the water for the dry season. The land is really dry and subject to drought and wild fire.

The social and political layer were relevant in that case study. Various ethnic groups live in the country. Due to the numerous ethnicities, there are tension and miscommunication between them. The aim of the future center is to create communication about the Mayan medicine and to allow more people to access to alternative healthcare. The week brought a lot of questions about biodiversity, sustainability and cultural representation in a difficult environment. The more we learned about, the more complex layers were added to the questioning of the studio. It was interesting to see how the Mayan community tries to have more voice in a complex country like Guatemala. It was also interesting to see that the traditions start to get lost because of the lack of written communications.

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