“Graceful gardening” in the museum-reserve “Tsaritsyno”

A festival of historical gardens has opened at the Tsaritsyno Museum-Reserve. Miniature parks, created by landscape designers and architects, appeared near the greenhouses as if by magic.

The theme of this year’s festival is Graceful Gardening, which was the name of the main gardening bestseller of the late 19th century, a book by the famous Russian gardener Arnold Regel. The scientist, dendrologist, theorist, connoisseur of artistic gardening and his passionate servant for fifteen years collected materials for his book. The excellent monograph by Arnold Eduardovich Regel has not lost its significance to this day.

The book was intended for gardeners-artists, builders of parks and, in addition to the pleasure of reading, it brought purely utilitarian benefits – it served as a guide in practical matters. Published in 1896 in St. Petersburg, by our standards – a luxurious edition with many drawings, drawings, engravings, elegant, whimsical screensavers, drop caps was very cheap and massive.

In his creation, the famous gardener managed to formulate the basic principles for creating landscape gardens, gave practical recommendations for beginners and connoisseurs of home gardens. This book is still appreciated by lovers of “graceful gardening”, who consider it the main textbook.

It is no coincidence that “graceful gardens” appeared in Tsaritsyno: Dmitry Mashinsky, Deputy General Director of the Tsaritsyno Museum-Reserve, noted that “Tsaritsyno was built as a country residence of Catherine II. A large landscape park was laid out around the palace, and at the end of the 19th century a summer cottage settlement appeared in Tsaritsyn, the inhabitants of which decorated their houses with flower beds. This year’s Historic Gardens Festival is all about fine gardening. This is how we pay tribute to garden architects of the past and support modern ones.”

The main event of the Historical Gardens Festival is an elegant open-air landscape exhibition created by talented Russian designers. In total, 10 compositions are presented – five large (100 square meters each) and five small ones (20 square meters each). The Garden Festival in Tsaritsyno is a unique living guide to different eras. For five years in a row, landscape designers have been trying to surprise Muscovites and city guests with their work. Each of the ten gardens presented here has its own zest, elusive charm that creates an amazing atmosphere of understatement, lightness and grace.

Here is how the great gardener Arnold Regel wrote: “The most solid guarantee of true success in any occupation is certain moral qualities, in the absence of which any work, even the most persistent, the most persistent, remains useless. Such qualities are usually expressed by the word “talent” or “talent”; – this is a common place in this case, at least the talent lends itself to a certain analysis, since the main quality of the artist is reduced to the presence of an elegant taste, which has already been mentioned more than once and will have to be mentioned again. But, in addition to taste, the presence of another, no less important factor is necessary: ​​sincere, genuine; serious love for the cause, and with it, of course, the due respect for it; both in life and in art, both of these concepts are inseparable in the sense that true love without respect does not exist. Read through this wonderful, though a little ornate quote, look at the creations of the masters, and you will understand that everything said 200 years ago absolutely fits the idea of ​​a modern festival!

This year the festival of historical gardens in Tsaritsyn will celebrate its anniversary. Exactly five years ago, in August 2018, the museum-reserve for the first time invited landscape architects and designers to the Air Gardens, who created an exhibition of park miniatures from different countries and eras. Tsaritsyno closes the fifth summer season with a wonderful bright holiday dedicated to gardens, flowers, art and creativity. During the ten days of the celebration of the flora, visitors will find a rich cultural program, concerts, lectures, master classes, author’s excursions, meetings with interesting people and much more. “This year there were more applications from landscape designers to participate in the festival than usual. But the jury selected only ten entries,” says Karen Meloyan, one of the organizers of the Festival of Historical Gardens in Tsaritsyn, “and five of the ten gardens are open and have 20-meter photo zones. Visitors will be able not only to enter the garden to admire the flowers, herbs, trees and shrubs, but also to take memorable pictures there. Previously, guests were not allowed into the gardens, they admired the creations of the masters from afar. But landscape designers took this moment into account and decided to “bring” their work closer to the visitors.”

Visitors will walk through the “Introduction” garden, which was created by the architect Oksana Brovkina. In her work, she used plants brought to Russia in the era of Peter I, which became the forerunners of elegant gardening in Russia. The Orenburg Shawl Garden, designed by architects Ekaterina Chukhas, Evgenia Vorontsova, Maria Badina and Ksenia Eremina, is filled with translucent perennial herbs and intertwined with metal thread: the artists showed the pattern of the Orenburg shawl. One of the most interesting “points” is the garden of Ekaterina Boganova, in which the author presented a mini-copy of the huge garden-garden of Leo Tolstoy. The great writer grew dill, pumpkin, physalis, and the writer also had greenhouses, an apple orchard and a beautiful rose garden. In the center of the hundred-meter garden “Graceful Game” there is a chessboard made of euonymus, creeping thyme and lawn grass. The composition was based on the Chessboard Fountain in Peterhof. Interestingly, all vegetables, medicinal herbs and medicinal plants, bright flowers and shrubs are very unpretentious and will decorate any suburban area.

Mikhail Kovalyov.

Author’s photo