Station 1 of 13 · Origin · explore by place

The Garden of Origins

The 13 plants behind the house’s materials, in one engraved garden laid out as a map. Open a plant for its trail: the plant, its material, its place, its molecules.

An illustrative garden The plants are not to scale and the garden is not a map you can measure: the beds stand in the order of their places of origin, west to east and north to south, not at their distances. The records hold the facts; every name and place here is read from them.

JavaScript is off or has not loaded, so the garden stays an engraved still. Its numbers, the engraved map below it and the list of the 13 plants hold every link.

The Garden of Origins, engraved: thirteen plants in low beds inside a kerb, the paths of the Tropics and the Equator across it, two plants outside the gate. Each number on the picture is a link to that plant’s trail.
The Garden of Origins, from above: an engraved mapThe garden’s beds are set in the order of their places of origin, west to east and north to south, not to scale; the paths are the Tropic of Cancer, the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. Two plants with no place on record wait outside the gate. Each numbered plant is a link to its trail below.TROPIC OF CANCEREQUATORTROPIC OF CAPRICORNThe Garden of OriginsIN THE ORDER OF THE MAP · NOT TO SCALENNO PLACE ON RECORD YET
The engraved map: the same garden from above, with the same thirteen links. On a small screen, slide the map sideways.

The 13 plants, west to east

Each plant is the source of one or more of the house’s materials. Its trail runs from the plant’s record to the material made from it, the place it grows, and the molecules the material is known for. Two plants with no place of origin on record yet wait outside the gate, after the others.

  12. Plant 12 of 13 · outside the gate: no place on record yet

    Gum rockrose Cistus ladanifer

    1. PlantCistus ladanifer L.part used: the leaves and stems, which exude the resin (labdanum)
    2. MaterialLabdanum absolute by solvent extraction
    3. PlaceNo place of origin is on record yet.
    4. MoleculeNo molecule on record yet.

    Read the record · specimen card no. 017

How the garden is laid out

  • Each plant stands in the bed of its first documented place of origin. The beds are spaced evenly in the order of their longitudes, from Haiti in the west to Borneo in the east, and set north or south by latitude, between 44.1° N and 20° S. So the paths of the Tropic of Cancer, the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn cross the garden between the right beds; the distances between the beds mean nothing.
  • The drawings are the house’s own, engraved like the site’s plates: simplified, not to scale, and not portraits of particular plants. Where a plant has more than one place on record, its trail lists them all; its bed stands for the first.
  • The 13 plants (one of them a lichen) are the plants behind the materials on record. Oakmoss is a lichen, not a plant (its record, after GBIF, places it in the kingdom Fungi); it is drawn here on a piece of oak bark.

The specimen cards

Opening a plant here can file its specimen card in the specimen cabinet, exactly as opening its record page does: only if you keep a learning profile on this device. “Collect its specimen card” asks first, with the cabinet’s own box. That keeps one entry, radler.profile.v1, in this browser’s local storage; nothing is sent, and the cabinet’s “Delete everything” removes it.

All the places of origin · All the plants · The harvest globe · The specimen cabinet · All the records

© Joe Radler / Radler Parfums. All rights reserved. No reuse without written permission. Terms.

the garden as data: /data/garden/garden.json · version 1 · updated 2026-10-08