Ruben Dario
In the West, the idea of the garden was initially linked to nostalgia for the loss of Eden; However, as time passed, the concept of garden became established and the perspective on nature developed with different approaches ranging from science to poetry and literature: «Nature embraces and surrounds the world. We tried to make the garden a livable place in many respects and a place where its boundaries are opened. This quote belongs to Marta Llorente’s article Between Nature and Architecture. Garden paradise, where the author directs us to real or imaginary gardens where the poetic or literary word is the common denominator.
This is not a text on the history of gardens, but, as its author says, about the “road to the garden” finding its meaning as a part of built space: “It is not only technique or architecture that creates gardens. Imagination also knows how to invent its corners, its gossips, its color.” And give life to the beings living in them (…) Novels, stories, poems and chronicles of all times used their words to remember the existence of the gardens of the past, which were often destroyed or transformed. Often the same gardens survived thanks to literature that knew how to remember them and give them a different life For Marta Llorente, an architect and teacher at a school of this discipline, the garden is “an idea, a way of thinking, an image. It occupies space in the space that mediates between nature and culture (…) The garden is a soul-like region where passions intermingle.”
In the city, “the garden has a distinctive order that completely differentiates it from the built environment.” This distinction is not only spatial but also semantic. The garden is a “heterotopia,” as Foucault describes the quality of some places in the city where life happens or conditions occur that are different from what happens in the rest of the city. We read in the pages of the book I commented on that the border of the garden, the wall that limits it, is seen from the outside as “the guardian of an inaccessible treasure, preserving the symbolic value required by the autonomy of the gardens.” Open.
The author tours the historical gardens, many of which were gardens of royalty and power saved for the citizens, the story of what happened there, and what inspired him when he visited these gardens. From the Retiro in Madrid to the Ciudadela park in Barcelona and from the Villa Médici in Rome – a garden associated with two paintings by Velazquez that intrigued the author of this article as well as the author – to New York’s Central Park; A tour accompanied by literary stories such as Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of Finzi Contini, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables or the New York through which the unforgettable Holden Caulfield passes in The Catcher in the Rye, without forgetting the essential literary and poetic elements of Vázquez Montalbán and Gil de Biedma Sights of Barcelona; and Akira Kurosawa’s Live Broadcast, which tells the story of an office worker who ends his life fighting to get a public park for citizens.
«The garden changed the rhythm of techniques and instruments; It has become an excellent field for experiments on a large scale. At the beginning of the section devoted to garden techniques, we read that the author touches on two issues that give identity to gardens, and that the tools used by human hands have always been used in gardens since the beginning of time. : stone and water, but we also find numerous references to the art, architecture and hydraulic engineering of the gardens that are shown to us throughout the pages, taking us back in time from Egypt to the mysterious Renaissance garden of Bomarzo. To the Crystal Palace of the same name, Kew Gardens and Paxton, by Manuel Mujica Laínez. “Water games”, devices for the pleasure and contemplation of the royal family and the court, would contribute to the development of hydraulic technique, which had one of the most advanced devices and hydraulic systems in Versailles from the 17th century.
On this route, the Alhambra of Granada has a special place where there is a wonderful combination of architecture, space, garden and words; the latter is expressed in words that decorate rooms such as the room of the Two Sisters: «I am the garden adorned by beauty / If you look at my beauty you will understand my existence» (poem by the Alhambra poet Ibn Zamrak, translated by Emilio García Gómez). In the Alhambra, as in the courtyards of the Lions and Myrtles, a magical transformation of spaces occurs through the music of water: “To live with the sound of water all the time must have meant something more to the inhabitants of the palace, something we cannot understand.” Understand,” the author of this article tells us.
The last part of this article is devoted to accompanying the image of the garden in literature and art from the late 19th century to the present. Referring to Baudelaire, he said, “It is a period when the few traces of nature around the poet begin to disappear. “I was alone, dazzled by the modern city.” In this ending we also find the “murmur of an abandoned garden” (Valle Inclán) inhabited by “echoes of footsteps in memory” (TSEliot), a garden where nature spreads freely, exemplifying the author’s vision of the idea. of a future garden: “Finding a suitable end to the garden is only possible in the company of a freer nature.”