MAINDOOR: Beardshaw's gardens
16 December 2014
MAINDOOR: Beardshaw's gardens
Chris Beardshaw’s English park on the territory of the Knightsbridge Private Park is a source of special pride for "RESTAVRACIA N". Chris has shared with us his vision of what parks and gardens mean for people in England and of the origins of the English landscape garden tradition.
The tradition to create an “intelligent” green space, artificial parks and gardens where plants and flowers grow in accordance with people’s deliberate choice, integrated into the architecture which they are meant to serve as a background for, has its origins in the XVII century England. The concept is rooted in the image of the Garden of Eden, where man was surrounded by harmonious beauty and enjoyed complete safety. The garden is isolated from the rest of the world, which swarms with perils and dangers outside the control of individual humans and not infrequently hostile to the latter. Serving as an antidote for this hostile world, parks and gardens primarily serve as a place for recreation, socialising and contemplation.
The rigorous geometric patterns of planting are meant to symbolise order and stability. The harmonious colour palette and the tender gurgle of water in fountains elicit pleasant associations, inspiring calm and tranquility. That is why the man-made green spaces serve as havens offering peace and safety for most people. They are also perceived as a binding link between the wild life and the divine order.
Plants and flowers for the park are selected either based on daily necessities, for example, for food, as medicinal plants or to give colours, or (and this is particularly true for large parks) to serve as embodiment of religious connotations. For example, a lily symbolises the purity of the Christian faith, while the red rose is associated with the spilled blood of Christ. Each plant has its own function, a special reason why it was selected to be planted in this particular garden.
These principles of form (austere orderliness) and substance (coherence) are fundamental for the English gardening tradition and, despite the constantly changing fashion, the fickle perception of what is trendy and what is not, the English landscape garden continues to be primarily a place for appreciating the aesthetical quality of the surrounding reality, a marvelous theatre of nature.
The park inside the Knightsbridge Private Park compound will be set up literally from scratch. We’ll begin by creating a landscape, highlighting theme-based green areas which will blend and flow one into another. This will provide visitors with an excellent opportunity to find both a bit of seclusion, to spend time on their own and to find place to meet with their friends on more open spaces.
With the concept and the landscape in place, we will busy ourselves with the selection of plants, since they are precisely the name of the game when it comes to success in creating a harmonious garden which, coupled with the architectural ensemble, is called to generate a single concept of perception for the Knightsbridge Private Park.
Gardens
What does garden mean for English people? How is landscape design related to the overall perception of the architectural body it serves to highlight?
Parks and gardens are part and parcel of the English social culture and identity. Just like the park, the garden is more than just a place where plants grow arranged in accordance with a determined pattern. Garden represents just one of the opportunities for its creator’s self-expression which is called to provide a balance between the inner world of an individual and the big outer world. And that is why the aesthetic perception of the garden is not confined to a one specific season. Instead it rather serves as a scene and scenery for a specific architectural space which it accompanies, shaping its style and artistic merit. The architecture itself becomes a protagonist in a landscape setting. The design of a park or a garden and the conduit may not exist apart, isolated from each other. They must be well integrated into each other, making up a single whole in the eyes of beholders.
The attitude to parks and gardens as part of the social culture has given an impulse for new possibilities to emerge in various domains of the art. Many artists, poets and musicians drew their inspiration from the aesthetic merit of the green expanses which they described in their works. This is particularly true of such romantic poets as John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Lord Byron in whose works landscape was invariably treated as part of the inner world of the narrators, following them throughout the plot and reflecting what was going on in their hearts. The beauty of nature portrayed on the paintings by John Constable, William Turner, and slightly later, David Hockney, is endowed with a distinctive nature, non-standard forms and shades.
The new interpretation of the world around you, attention to details and the desire to introduce elements of pristine nature into the hectic everyday life, borrowing ideas straight from Mother Nature’s treasury, has delivered an impulse for the birth of the Arts and Crafts movement in the late XIX century England, which had in its turn manifested itself through Art Nouveau, later occupying its independent niche in such segment of the art as design.
Plants selected for the Knightsbridge Private Park hail from many parts of the world. What is the main selection principle behind the park’s floral portfolio? Is it at all possible to draw a parallel between plants growing in parks and people living in big cities? People of all creeds and nations living in one city are compelled, on the one hand, to modify their lifestyle and, on the other, to seek ways to preserve its individuality. How do plants that hail from different geographic zones cope with co-existence in one garden?
The park inside the Knightsbridge Private Park compound will be set up literally from scratch. We have no restrictions as far as the number of possible combinations of various plants goes, and this is what I find to be most attractive about this project. We’ll begin by creating a landscape, highlighting theme-based green areas which will blend and flow one into another. This will provide visitors with an excellent opportunity to find both a bit of seclusion, to spend time on their own and to find place to meet with their friends on more open spaces.
With the concept and the landscape in place, we will busy ourselves with the selection of plants, since they are precisely the name of the game when it comes to success in creating a harmonious garden which, coupled with the architectural ensemble, is called to generate a single concept of perception for the Knightsbridge Private Park.
The fragrant rose blooming, the tender spread of the pink Chinese cherry flowers against the backdrop of a blue spring sky, the concise curves of the shrubs covered in snow, together will create a unique, special mood which will be appreciated by all visitors to the park. Every single plant growing in the Knightsbridge Private Park has been selected by hand, with great consideration for their artistic value in the overall concept of the park.
The park’s floral portfolio was made up of plants hailing from all around the world. The principle behind their selection was based not only on their adaptability to the Russian climate, but also on the climate and the аура projected by each plant itself. Similarly to people, each with his or her own personality and quirks, each plant is likewise endowed with its peculiar characteristics. Quite naturally, plants change too when changing their geographic location or when compelled to co-exist within one limited space with other plants. Yet an experienced gardener will do his or her best to ensure the plant show its true worth, the best of what the nature has endowed it with, while remaining an integrated element of the entire pattern of the park.