During his Journey to Italy in 1786, Goethe visited the Botanical Garden of Padua and was deeply impressed by a dwarf palm (Chamaerops humilis), which had been cultivated there for more than a hundred years.
“Today I visited the Botanical Garden, the oldest in Europe. There is a palm tree that has been growing under a glass window for more than a hundred years: it is tall, slender, full of life and beauty. I have never seen anything like it in the plant kingdom; this plant made me think of many things. I have the impression that here, in front of this palm tree, I have discovered the secret of the shape of plants in general, and I am close to solving the problem of how they turn into each other. Perhaps I will find my original plant (Urpflanze) here. If I find it, then I will also know how all plants are formed, how they are determined according to a law, and develop into new forms. Form is something mobile, something fluid, something that becomes. “
Journey to Italy – Letters – Diaries, September 27, 1786
The Padua palm was for Goethe the living symbol of the unity and transformation of nature. Observing its form and vitality, he intuited a fundamental principle: all plants are derived from an “original plant”(urpflanze) and their forms are transformations of a common structure. This insight led him to develop his theory of plant metamorphosis, according to which each plant part is a variation of the same basic form. A few years later, in 1790, Goethe published “Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären” (Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants), in which he argued that all parts of a plant – from seed to leaf, from flower to fruit – were but variations of the same primordial form (the
