PARCO DEI GIARDINI – GIARDINO DELLA CÀ BURA (44°32'20.90"N, 11°21'15.67"E)
L’area di osservazione fenologica (PMA) si trova all’interno del Parco dei Giardini, nella zona Est. Le caratteristiche pedologiche hanno consentito un buon attecchimento delle specie le quali evidenziano un buon adattamento in questa zona.
L’area verde, di circa 10 ettari di superficie, è compresa tra via dell’Arcoveggio e via dei Giardini, in una zona prossima al canale Navile e al nucleo storico di Corticella, dove nuovi e imponenti insediamenti residenziali si alternano a gruppi di abitazioni più piccole, in buona parte edificate prima dell’ultima guerra. Il parco si sviluppa intorno a un asse centrale che, tra due grandi dossi di forma allungata, collega una piazza pavimentata con un gazebo che si protende sopra un ampio specchio d’acqua.

PARCO NICHOLAS GREEN (44°29'50.02"N, 11°18'12.98"E)
L’area PMA si trova all’interno del Parco Nicholas Green, nelle vicinanze di una scuola primaria e di una scuola secondaria di primo grado, entrambe coinvolte nel Progetto Clivut. Le specie utilizzate per la realizzazione dell’area di osservazione fenologica si sono ben adattate alle caratteristiche pedologiche del terreno.
Il parco Nicholas Green è un triangolo di verde che si estende fra l’asse attrezzato dell’89 (comunque invisibile e silente) e il cimitero della Certosa. Un tempo era il parco di Villa Contri, a ricordo dell’edificio padronale che qui sorgeva, ma da una decina di anni a questa parte è stato intitolato al bambino statunitense ucciso nel 1994 (a soli 7 anni) sull'autostrada A2 Napoli-Reggio Calabria nei pressi di Vibo Valentia), mentre, durante un viaggio in Italia, era diretto in Sicilia con i genitori; l’auto su cui viaggiavano fu accidentalmente scambiata per quella di un gioielliere da alcuni rapinatori che tentarono un furto.

PARCO DI VILLA GHIGI (44°28'36.06"N, 11°19'23.99"E)
L’area del Parco di Villa Ghigi è stata scelta per la realizzazione di una delle tre PMA. Le specie scelte per l’area fenologica hanno evidenziato un buon attecchimento e, attraverso le osservazioni delle loro fasi di sviluppo, un buon adattamento all’area scelta.
Il parco si estende per una trentina di ettari intorno a un’antica villa nobiliare sulle prime colline bolognesi, poco fuori porta San Mamolo e in vista del centro cittadino. Ceduto all’Amministrazione comunale nel 1972 dagli eredi dell’ultimo proprietario, lo zoologo Alessandro Ghigi, che già ne aveva donato una limitata porzione nel decennio precedente, il parco è oggi una delle più gradevoli aree verdi pubbliche della collina bolognese. Il territorio è racchiuso nella cosiddetta Valverde, una vallecola incisa dal rio Fontane, affluente del torrente Aposa, che è limitata a nord dal colle dell’Osservanza, con l’imponente convento e Villa Aldini, e verso sud dal colle di Ronzano, alla cui sommità sorge l’antico eremo nascosto da una folta macchia boscata.

Bologna's green assets

Le aree verdi pubbliche del Comune di Bologna ammontano a circa 1.050 ettari, pari a circa l'8% dell'estensione totale del territorio comunale. Il patrimonio verde comunale è organizzato in parchi e giardini, aree estese (ubicate principalmente in montagna e lungo il fiume), aree verdi delle scuole, aree annesse a edifici pubblici e centri sportivi, ma anche aree verdi di arredo urbano, con particolare riferimento per le fasce ambientali che fiancheggiano le principali vie di accesso alla città.

Quasi il 70% del patrimonio verde è costituito da aree verdi attrezzate, ovvero spazi fruibili dai cittadini. Spiccano per le loro dimensioni i grandi ed estesi parchi situati nelle colline a sud della città e lungo i corsi d'acqua che corrono nell'area urbana (il torrente Savena a est e il fiume Reno a nord).

A questi si affiancano alcuni grandi parchi urbani, alcuni storici (Giardini Margherita, Parco della Montagnola, Villa Spada e Villa delle Rose, solo per citarne alcuni), altri dal design moderno, come Pier O parque Paolo Pasolini, Parco Nicholas Green o quelli di Via dei Giardini (zona Ca'Bura). Alcune centinaia di giardini e piccoli orti di rilievo nelle vicinanze completano il patrimonio di aree verdi attrezzate.

All'interno delle aree verdi e lungo le strade cittadine sono presenti oltre 84.000 alberi censiti individualmente, di cui 18.000 ombreggiano le strade cittadine. Oltre a questa ricca offerta di alberi, ci sono anche alberi trovati in frammenti di foresta, principalmente nei parchi collinari, dove si stima che ci siano altri 40.000 alberi.

Oltre alla vegetazione pubblica, è presente anche la vegetazione ornamentale privata, cioè la vegetazione presente nei terreni e nei giardini delle case (ville, chalet, condomini) che ricopre un'area simile a quella della vegetazione pubblica. Di conseguenza, più del 15% del territorio comunale è ricoperto da vegetazione ornamentale. L'offerta di vegetazione privata è particolarmente concentrata in alcune zone di Bologna, che per questa caratteristica hanno assunto il nome di “città giardino”.

Parco 11 settembre 2001 - Urban Park

The garden is enclosed by the wall of a former tobacco factory, established in 1801 on the site of a former convent. The tobacco fatory’s production facilities, which were bombed during the Second World War, were later demolished, thus becoming a public garden in 1981. Its tree vegetation consists mainly of linden, elm and field maple trees. A large polycormic plane tree to the south of the garden is noteworthy. The current name of the Park is a reminder of the tragedy of the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.



Giardini Margherita - Historical Gardens

It is the largest and most popular urban park in the city. Designed by the Piedmontese Ernesto Balbo Bertone di Sambuy to provide Bologna with a large public green space, similar to those in major Italian and European cities. It was inaugurated in 1879 as the Passeggio Regina Margherita (wife of King Umberto I). The park retains part of its original appearance, vaguely inspired by the great romantic English parks, with wide tree-lined avenues, a small lake with mock wide tree-lined avenues, a pond with fake chalk cliffs, vast areas of lawn, oak groves and other more natural corners, an array of remarkable, mainly exotic tree species (cedars, pines, horse chestnuts, plane trees, bald cypresses, a sequoia and some oak trees). On the southern side of the lake, is the short open-air stretch of the ancient Savena canal, one of the waterways that characterised the city in the Middle Ages. There are facilities of all kinds: well- equipped playgrounds for kids, a Youth Centre and annexed volleyball and basketball courts. Benches, drinking water fountains, ice cream kiosks and tennis courts make the park a popular meeting place.



Villa Bernaroli - Cultivated Public Areas

Villa Bernaroli, a late 17th-century manor house and adjacent area, is the focus of cultural and rehabilitation activities in an area of about 50 ha, including farmland, farm buildings and one of the largest horticultural areas managed by the municipality of Bologna. The rural landscape, which is still easily recognisable, preserves numerous field maple trees with 'married' vines at the edges of the fields and the presence of isolated farnias, poplars and elms. Since 2013, this intra-urban green area has been part of the "Parco Città Campagna" project, which aims to enhance and make more usable a vast area of the plains west of Bologna, between the Reno river and the Samoggia stream. Financed by the Emilia-Romagna Region, the project aims at promoting local agriculture and recovering the minor roads as tools to strengthen the identity of the rural peri-urban area and enhance the landscape and historical-cultural heritage. Four centralities have been defined (including Villa Bernaroli), which represent the main elements of identity and attraction for the area, connected by a network of bicycle and pedestrian paths, which allow to reach the most valuable areas and farms in the area:
- Total surface area: 7,300 hectares
- Tength of the route: 30 km.



Scuole Grosso - School Green

Parco Grosso is a large school green space, to which the Grosso nursery and kindergarten belong, as well as the Children's and Parents' Centre and Children's Space "Via del Grosso Tasso".
The presence of an open-air teaching room, managed by the Ghigi Foundation, makes it possible to carry out garden work, clay creations, insect nests to build and twigs to animate. There are also gardens in boxes and small ships to sail in the former swimming pool.
The park is adjacent to the Grosso primary school and the Nuova Navile nursery school of the Istituto Comprensivo 5.



Orto botanico dell’Unive rsità di Bologna – Alma Mater Studiorum - Botanical Garden

The Botanical Garden of Bologna is located in the heart of the university area. Founded in the 16th century, it is one of the oldest in Europe.
The green area, with a rectangular plan, reaches the ancient city walls. It houses particularly valuable thematic collections and reconstructions of natural environments such as a floodplain wood, a pond and a rock garden. The Botanical Garden also has four greenhouses, two tropical and two succulent. A small greenhouse houses a collection of insectivorous plants. The museum area houses a herbarium with more than 130,000 plant specimens, including the precious collections of Ulisse Aldrovandi and Antonio Bertoloni.



Verde annesso al Centro Commerci ale ‘Meraville’ - Commercial green areas for public use

Established in the first decade of 2000, at the same time as the opening of the Meraville shopping park, the green area is made up of two typologies. The first one for furnishing and shading the parking areas and consisting of ornamental tree and shrub species such as flowering pear trees, albizzie, hybrid poplar trees, lime trees, holm oaks and tamarisk trees. The second is a large artificial green hill with a large use of trees and shrubs selected from the autochthonous flora, including field maples, manna ashes, baguettes and plants of landscape and agricultural value such as the cypress poplar, planted in rows along Via San Donato.
On the top of the hill in 2018, a selection of fruit tree cultivars in old local varieties were planted.



Cimitero monumentale della Certosa - Cemetery Green

The municipal cemetery was established in 1801 by reusing the pre-existing structures of the Certosa di San Girolamo di Casara, founded in the mid- fourteenth century, suppressed in 1797 by Napoleon, and whose Church of San Girolamo is still in use. The strong passion of the nobility and the bourgeoisie for the construction of family tombs turned the Charterhouse into a veritable "open- air museum", a stop on the Italian Grand Tour: Chateaubriand, Byron, Dickens, Mommsen and Stendhal all visited it. With about 2,500 trees, the cypress is the dominant one, followed by yews, tuje, other conifers and ornamental deciduous trees.



Arredo verde ‘Asse Attrezzato’ di collegame nto tra Bologna e Casalecchio di Reno - Street Green

The so-called 'Asse Attrezzato Sud-Ovest', is a link road built in the 1970s, following and adapting to the times the project for a ring road already provided for in Bologna's first Regulatory Plan of 1889. The Bologna section is about 2.5 km long, starting north from the Prati di Caprara area and south with the bridge over the Reno river, with two separate carriageways and three lanes of traffic each, and is almost entirely built in a trench.
Two large roundabouts and the side embankments are the green road furniture consisting mainly of grassy areas and occasional patches of trees (poplars, holm oaks, Atlas cedars, etc.) alternating with informal hedges of laurel, lentigo, forsythia and lagerstroemia.



Villa Mazzacorati / Giardino Ferruccio Busoni - Private Park for Public Use

The villa today is owned by the Bologna Health Agency. The villa has always been surrounded by a vast garden, whose thick vegetation use to be vast in the surrounding estate, now much reduced. In front of the villa there are traces of an "Italian style" garden, with a fountain, some specimens of holm oaks, yews, cedars and thorny oranges. There is also a small greenhouse housing a collection of tropical orchids.



Villa Ghigi - Nature Trail

The park extends for about thirty hectares around an ancient noble villa on the first hills of Bologna, in view of the city centre. Ceded to the municipal administration in 1972 by the heirs of the last owner, the zoologist Alessandro Ghigi, the park is now one of the most pleasant public green areas in the hills around Bologna. The territory is enclosed in the so-called Valverde, a valley cut by the Fontane stream, a tributary of the Aposa torrent, which is bounded to the north by the Osservanza hilli, and to the south by the Ronzano hill, at the top of which stands the ancient hermitage hidden by thick woodland.
The villa is flanked by the small caretaker's house, now used as a refreshment point, near which is the old ice-house.

Wide meadows marked by rows of old fruit trees and long grassy hollows occupy most of the area, which also includes a few vineyards and various wooded patches, different in origin and characteristics, with strips of natural woodland and more recent plantings. A relict but interesting beech wood stands out, surrounded by strips of oak woodland, planted at the end of the 19th century and now reserved for guided tours. Both the meadows and the wooded areas are characterised by a great floristic richness, already documented in scientific works of the last century. In the central area of the park, the compact frame of ornamental greenery stands out, with numerous exotic evergreen species and majestic trees, which surrounds the uninhabited villa. Evidence of the area's strong agrarian connotation is also the presence of two farmhouses, including the Palazzino, now restored and home to the Villa Ghigi Foundation, which has been managing the park since 2004.

The Palazzino is also a support point for the educational activities for schools organised by the Foundation. Thanks to careful management aimed at safeguarding spontaneous species and to a series of extraordinary interventions on the paths and the surface water regulation network, the park has now regained its past charm and expresses its full potential.