Map Regressions, Time Travel and the Mikhailovsky Garden

The Summer Gardens and the Mars Field. A project of architect J-B. Leblond, 1716-1717

The general layout of the Mikhailovsky Garden and the Labyrinth Garden by architect F.B. Rastrelli, 1750

The Third Summer Garden and its surroundings according to the third General Layout of St. Petersburg. Copied from an 1820 layout, prior to the renovations below.

The Mikhailovsky Garden according to K.I. Rossi’s report layout, 1822

Map regressions are a standard tool of the garden historian. They're like time travel really--all the historical geographical records are assembled and registered to definite landmarks so that changes in the landscape features over time become visible.

This isn't easy; much of the information is incomplete at best. Some 'maps' may be only hand-drawn sketches without scale or compass markings. A map of a neighboring property or an old photograph might show only a piece of the garden. Government documents often mark roads and bridges and bodies of water, but no garden features. Textual descriptions can be hard to relate to facts on the ground. And registration of features, especially in amateur maps, can be inaccurate.

Royal gardens are better documented than most, however, and it is the lucky garden historian that ends up with as complete a record as the series above, for the Mikhailovsky gardens in St. Petersburg, originally laid out by architect J.B. Leblond for Peter I in 1716-1717.

Any garden historian worth their salt could put the series of maps above in relative order from earliest to latest, but I was surprised to discover their actual dates of construction (as listed above). Each layout lags about fifty years behind adoption of the same styles in England, an expression, perhaps of the literal and symbolic distance of the Tsars from the cultural centers of Europe. The small, disconnected geometric gardens in the first map are in the manner of the seventeenth century, not the eighteenth, and by 1750 the English landscape was already well on its way to the open and sweeping style not seen in the Mikhailovsky garden until 1820. (Note especially the naturalization of the bodies of water)

This is of interest to garden history, but map regressions are often prepared in anticipation of a garden restoration and so the problem in the twenty-first century becomes which garden to recreate?

It is a serious question in historic landscapes, which have multiple layers of time and meaning. Often, the most recent style is the easiest one to which to return. Traveling further back in time could require the removal of the top layers--layers that might include mature trees, or extant landscape features like ponds to which contemporary visitors have become attached.

Rarely, though, a connection to some serious historic event, or the need to provide the proper setting for a significant piece of architecture, make the return to a more distant time an appropriate choice.

In the Mikhailovsky garden, a reconstruction project carried out by the State Institute of Architecture in St. Petersburg in 2001 returned the garden to its most recent designed layer, the naturalistic English landscape park of 1822. Its map will someday serve to mark the layer of the twenty-first century for a garden historian of the future.

The Leopold Bench: Updated

a contemporary color and setting for the aforeposted Leopold bench, by De Leon & Primmer Architecture Workshop

Langston Hughes' Children's Garden, Harlem, 1955

From The Life of Langston Hughes, by Arnold Rampersad, found at cityfarmer

"In the backyard at 20 East 127th Street, (Mr. Langston’s home) where the lawn in the summer of 1954 was dense and green, a gardener named Mr. Sacred Heart, a follower of the evangelist Father Divine, planted some flowering shrubs. In front of the house, at Langston’s request, someone planted Boston Ivy that crept up the walls and eventually luxuriated, so that everyone knew in which house on the street had lived the poet Langston Hughes. But most of the patch of earth beside the front steps, about six feet square, was barren from years of trampling by neighbourhood children, who had little time for flowers. Langston decided to rescue it, and teach the children a tender lesson at the same time. He named the plot their garden.

From Amy Spingarn’s home upstate in Dutchess County came nasturtiums, asters and marigold. Under his supervision, aided by Mr. Sacred Heart, each child chose a plant, set it, and assumed partial responsibility for weeding and watering the garden. On a picket beside each plant was posted a child’s name. Proud of the garden, which flourished, and prouder still of his children, Langston was photographed at least once beaming in their midst."

How could you go wrong with a gardener named Mr. Sacred Heart?

Cupid in the Garden

From the previously posted English Emblem Books project comes this selection from the Emblemata Amatoria of Philip Ayres (1638-1712) which utilizes several garden motifs, including the symbol of a sunflower turning its head to the sun. Ayres was a minor English poet and a friend of Dryden's, and though not his equal in verse, the Emblemata of Love is uniformly charming.

The last picture shown is "The Powerfull Attraction" :

Where e're shee be, the difstance nere so great
mounted on sighs, thither my winged soul
does take its flight, and on her motions wait,

True as magnetick needle to its pole.

Happy Valentine's Day!
arcady

Char Bagh

Dividing a walled garden into equivalent quadrants is a natural geometric impulse, and the resulting four-square form appears in the garden history of most cultures.

The 'Char Bagh' (meaning, literally, 'four gardens'), though of Persian origins, has become most closely associated with the Mughal empire, an Islamic dynasty that ruled between 1526 and 1858 in territories now divided among Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and northern India. The beautiful image above is a leaf from a Mughal manuscript now in the collection of the British Museum, c. 1590.

Most ancient gardens are metaphors for Paradise,and the Char Bagh is no exception, as perhaps best described in the mysterious volume of Sir John Mandeville's travels into the East, c. 1370:

"And this Paradise is enclosed all about with a wall...and in the most high place of Paradise, even in the middle place, is a well that casteth out the four floods that run by divers lands. Of the which, the first is clept Pison, or Ganges, that is all one; and it runneth throughout Ind or Emlak, in the which river be many precious stones, and much of lignum aloes and much gravel of gold. And that other river is clept Nilus or Gison, that goeth by Ethiopia and after by Egypt. And that other is clept Tigris, that runneth by Assyria and by Armenia the great. And that other is clept Euphrates, that runneth also by Media and Armenia and by Persia. And men there beyond say, that all the sweet waters of the world, above and beneath, take their beginning of the well of Paradise, and out of that well all waters come and go."

In an arid climate the ideal of heaven as a well-watered and verdant oasis was of special importance, and the quadrants of the Char Bagh are most often divided by canals (if large) or rills (if small) representing those four rivers of Paradise. The quadrants themselves are generally, but not always, symmetrical, and may be filled with loose, informal plantings that sometimes take on additional symbolic significance--cypresses for death, almond trees for life.

The ultimate example is perhaps the garden of the Taj Mahal, its quadrants centered upon the great mausoleum, resting the departed beloved in a vision of paradise. [drawing, c. 1750, from the collection of the Arthur M. Sackler gallery at the Smithsonian]

Mughal gardens have been the object of much scholarly research in recent years, being (arguably) the most active area of garden history research during the 1990s, and resulting in an excellent website on the subject at the Smithsonian.