World landscape of the year

Awards are funny things. A while ago I was sniffy on this blog about Gardens Illustrated’s Garden of the Year, which seemed to be picked from a random shortlist solely on the basis of a few photographs.

Now I’ve visited another feted design, this time with the even grander award of World Landscape Project of the Year.  The current holder of this title is the awkwardly named Bishan – Ang Mo Kio Park in Singapore. It’s a linear neighbourhood park in the residential centre of the island, a bus ride away from the tourist spots, and of course on a recent visit I dragged my reluctant family there to see what the fuss was about.

The judges’ comments certainly made it seem worth a visit:

This remarkable project fundamentally transforms the urban landscape of Singapore by reversing the fundamentals of 1960s thinking on drainage canals into an ecological and people-friendly urban sponge. It powerfully embraces the extremes of flooding disasters, while providing a rustic and poetic simplicity with its landscape strategy for the public. Its large scale with subtle local effects also showcases truly sustainable strategies.

Fifty years ago, in line with the thinking of the time, the Kallang river had been forced into a concrete canal to whisk storm water efficiently away from this developing part of Singapore. The park was added either side of the canal in the late 1980s but, for safety reasons (remember that this equatorial part of the world has up to 25cm of rain a month, much of it in thunderous downpours), the water was fenced off and inaccessible to park users.

Image of the old canal from information board at the park

Now the German design firm of Atelier Dreiseitl has broken up the canal and introduced a naturalistic path for the river, which flows through a created flood plain, allowing the water levels to fluctuate significantly and thus limit the risk of flooding downstream. The new approach also allows visitors to interact with the water, and better understand its processes, and has apparently increased the biodiversity of the park by thirty percent.

Plan of the park, from information board on site.

As a helpful sign explained, the risk of soil and bank erosion along the new waterway has been addressed through various combinations of vegetation and other natural materials, from rip-rap and fascines to reed rolls and gabions.

There is also a large bioswale, which uses certain plants to improve water quality by filtering out pollutants and absorbing nutrients.   

Part of the purpose of the bioswale is to support the children’s water playground, which when we visited was sadly closed for unspecified reasons. But there are two other funky (if not obviously eco-friendly) playgrounds.

This project is doubtless a great piece of engineering, probably worthy of its award, and has without question left Bishan-Ang Mo Kio park more aesthetically pleasing than it was. There is an impressively holistic approach to the redesign, and a nice attention to detail. Informational signage is good (if all clustered in one part of the park), the playgrounds were a hit with my nine-year-old, and there is little doubt that the changes aim to make the park work in a more natural and sustainable way.

You can probably sense the “but” coming. I was left with two nagging concerns: first that this naturalistic park somehow couldn’t escape the manicured, pristine feel that pervades all of Singapore, which I have described elsewhere. Maybe that is just because it so new.

More worryingly, it was a public holiday when we visited and yet, as you can see from these photos, the park was almost deserted. A few children made use of the playgrounds, and we saw two small groups of older kids near the water, armed with little fishing nets. It struck me that there is precious little shade (less than before the changes), and most of the paths felt very exposed in the constant heat and humidity of Singapore.

For much of its 62 hectares, and despite the designers’ aims to create new spaces for the community to enjoy, Bishan-Ang Mo Kio park felt more like a piece of restored wetland than a traditional public park – and I am still musing on how far that matters. Do designers need to do more to make sustainable landscapes obviously suitable for people – or do we as visitors need to adjust our expectations and find new ways to enjoy and use this innovative kind of park?

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The greenest city?

It seems appropriate that Singapore is the only country in the world with a hybrid as its national flower, the orchid Vanda ‘Miss Joaquim.’ This is such a manicured, efficient, tightly-managed country, that somehow a natural species wouldn’t seem quite right as its symbol.

It’s also a country with many admirable policies on sustainability, some of which have been in place since the 1960s. The most obvious result is the sheer amount of green space that is crammed (neatly of course) into every spare inch of the island – on rooftops and roadsides, along walkways, in window boxes and tubs, sometimes vertically, sometimes hundreds of feet in the air.

The excellent botanical gardens are an interesting mix, with lawns, trees and traditionally labelled plants in borders, laid out around a dramatic remnant of Singapore’s tropical rainforest. Saving the remaining small portions of original jungle is admirable, and I liked the boardwalks that allowed visitors to stroll through the primeval vegetation. But it did feel rather as if Singapore can’t quite allow all that scale and lushness and primitive disorder to persist without it being surrounded and constrained by the neat classifications and control of the botanical displays.

Almost as dramatic as the rainforest was a brand new public park built on the marina, called Gardens by the Bay. It’s hard not to be impressed by this vast construction, with its artificial supertrees, lakes, displays, gardens, and glass conservatories. Indeed it just won the World Building of the Year award, for its celebration of nature in such a dense urban environment, and its innovative, naturally-cooled glasshouses. Everything about it is big and confident – the dazzling view across the site as visitors arrive on an elevated walkway, the group of vast supertrees (described rather incongruously as a grove), the curvaceous glasshouses, and the external planting all colour co-ordinated with the maroon of the construction materials.

Inside the first of the glasshouses, called the Flower Dome, are carefully-arranged displays of plants from every continent, with explanations of their origin, uses and cultivation needs. These are supplemented by seasonal shows aimed particularly at kids. For us it was autumnal harvests; now it’s apparently Christmas scenes. The dome itself is rather beautiful, with its high-tech curved glass ceiling stretching out above the displays.

The second glasshouse is billed as a Cloud Forest, mimicking mists and mountains with a vast cascade (apparently the biggest indoor waterfall in the world), and masses of tropical vertical planting.

All a bit shipshape and tidy for me, certainly compared with scruffy, ancient, irrepressible India, but fascinating and deeply impressive all the same. For more examples of interesting garden initiatives in Singapore, see Noel Kingsbury’s recent post on the Gardening Gone Wild blog. If, like me, you’re fascinated by park signage, I’ve written about a few examples from this visit in Tell-tale signs. And in my next post, I’ll explore an award-winning neighbourhood park we saw while in Singapore.

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The Unexpected Joys of Quarrying

One of the pleasures of landscape history is the often surprising places where information can be found. Trainspotters’ model drawings,  last wills and testaments, records from a convent, romantic novels, legal opinions, photographs on Facebook – all have in their time helped me understand and interpret historical landscapes. And this month I was shown another unexpected example.

A couple of years ago, I published a book on Fresh Pond, a historically rich landscape in Massachusetts, now the main source of the water supply for the city of Cambridge. No central archive exists on the landscape, and so I had spent several years digging around in obscure places for information and images. The task was made harder because in the late 1800s, to protect the purity of the water, the city had rapidly cleared the land of all its historical buildings, and quarried the surrounding glacial hills for gravel to make the shoreline more regular. This left steep, raw wounds over much of the landscape, ugly gashes of exposed rock and sand, much criticised by the Olmsted firm of landscape architects which was subsequently brought in to ‘beautify the borders’ of a new park planned on the shores.

The quarrying left the landscape unattractive and unloved. Virtually no photographs seemed to exist from this period, and my book had to rely largely on descriptions and occasional 2D plans. Then last week a colleague in Cambridge sent me a link to a cache of rediscovered photographs put on line by Harvard University, 23 of them of Fresh Pond, all from the winter of 1887/88. It turns out that the exposed gravel and sand had appealed to a new group of visitors: the Harvard geology department had sent professional photographers to capture images of contorted glacial gravels, shored kames, faulted sands, and upturned and overfolded shore-strips of ice at Fresh Pond. The man-made structures caught by the lens were of no interest to the geologists, and were left unlabelled and unremarked, but for many of the historical buildings at Fresh Pond these long-forgotten images serve as the only known photographs. Within five years all such structures had been swept away by the city.

I spent a couple of very enjoyable hours matching the dwellings, icehouses and bridges suddenly brought alive in the photographs to the plans so familiar to me from years of research. And I thought again of the unexpected reasons why people document and photograph the land, and how we landscape historians need to seek out and relish every example.

An 1888 map of Fresh Pond, showing the ice houses and dwelling owned by the Fresh Pond Ice Company. Image from the Massachusetts Archives.

A newly rediscovered image from 1887/88 of the Fresh Pond Ice Company’s properties on the shoreline, from the George Augustus Gardner collection of photographs, Cabot Science Special Collections, Harvard University.

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A mysterious French designer…

Search the internet for Elie Laîné and you’ll readily find that he was a once-celebrated nineteenth century French landscape designer. You’ll learn that he worked on big projects in at least three countries, with illustrious clients (including the Rothschilds and Leopold II, king of the Belgians) and top-notch collaborators such as the architect Hippolyte Destailleur.

Image of the Le Nôtre gardens at Vaux le Vicomte, during the time Elie Laîné was in charge of their restoration; Destailleur restored the château. From an album of photographs dated 1894-1898 in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Yet try to find out more, and Monsieur Laîné seems to slip into the shadows. I was delighted to see some of his plans and letters in the royal archives in Belgium, but no-one has been able to find original papers for any of his designs in England or France. His personal and professional life seem a complete blank. French sources now regularly describe him as méconnu - little known or forgotten.

Sketch signed & dated in Laîné’s hand. From the royal archives in Brussels.

It is proving fascinating and often frustrating to attempt to piece together his work and life (especially when I am thousands of miles away from most potential sources of information). Many people have been more than kind in providing their time and sharing their knowledge. In particular, one family member (despite speaking no French) used her genealogical expertise to trawl through hundreds of actes d’état civil and track down Laîné’s date and place of birth, and the names of his immediate family.

So what progress have I made? I certainly now have enough information for an article on Elie Lainé, the first one ever, it seems, dedicated to this important designer. The article should appear in a forthcoming edition of Historic Gardens Review, and will give a good sense of many of his projects, with some plans and information from letters he wrote about his designs for the king of Belgium. I can also give at least a glimpse of  his early life in the Loire valley and his time in Paris – and some hints about his character.

But there is so much more to learn about him. I still have no idea where he trained or how he became the landscape designer of choice for many rich clients; I have found no photograph of him; his place and exact date of death remain a mystery.

If anyone reading this has any information on the mysterious Monsieur Laîné, no matter how small, please do get in touch. I suspect that I will continue this research long after the article appears…

New planting to the north of the entrance drive at Waddesdon Manor in England c.1875, to a design by Elie Laîné. From the Rothschild Archive.

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Garden theme park disregards big attraction

We are in Northumberland for a couple of weeks, escaping the worst heat of the Delhi summer. A few days ago we revisited the rather pompously titled The Alnwick Garden, a  site created by the Duchess of Northumberland in part of the grounds of the ancient Alnwick Castle.

It is a garden I try – and fail – to love. The Duchess took a brave decision to use contemporary designs and designers to make this new site, rather than creating something classical and safe. She argued at the outset in 2001 that ”No gardens of this scale and ambition have been undertaken in Britain during this century. And no gardens will have quite such a magical effect on those who visit them.”  The Garden’s website now trumpets its “Must See” features, including the Poison Garden, the Tree House (apparently one of the world’s largest), the Serpent Garden with its hidden water features, and the Grand Cascade.

The garden is well – and expensively – done, much of the planting is lovely, and it is undoubtedly popular and increasingly well-known. Yet for me it has no sense of place or character. Instead it feels rather like a theme park, a collection of roller coaster garden experiences all stuck together in one big shiny venue, giving you lots of bangs for your buck, as they say, but no atmosphere or associations or quiet moments of reflection. It is a garden without a soul.

The rest of the castle grounds are utterly different. They are the characteristic distillation of the English countryside for which Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown is renowned. Created in the 1760s, the grounds are a fine example of his work, not perfectly preserved, but still a beautiful mix of trees, grass, water and English sky, setting off the castle building and providing a magnificent sense of permanence and serenity. The contrast with the gaudy business and sparkle of The Alnwick Garden just over the fence is delicious. The grounds offer a perfect spot to picnic, enjoy the fine views, and just to relax and ponder for a little while.

Yet, as far as I can see, the publicity for The Alnwick Garden makes no mention of the attractions of the castle grounds, despite them being assessed as of Grade I (exceptional) significance and having been designed by one of the most influential men ever to come from Northumberland (Brown was born and raised in nearby Kirkharle, and was no doubt much influenced by the lush, open countryside of his home county). When I asked at The Garden ticket booth whether my entrance fee allowed me to visit the Capability Brown landscape as well, I was met by a puzzled look, and had to explain what I meant – and then was wrongly told that it did not.

Maybe the contrast between the two garden styles is just too great to attract the same visitors. My nine-year-old daughter loves The Garden’s interactive water features, its dumper trucks and wobbly rope bridges. When I took her to the back window of the upscale gift shop, to peer at the Brownian landscape just visible behind the row of tills, she looked genuinely puzzled and said  to me: But, mum, it’s just grass and trees…

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Two memorials for the Mahatma

It was 64 years ago today that Mohandas Gandhi (known as Mahatma, the great soul) was murdered by a Hindu extremist, who believed Gandhi had been too sympathetic to the Muslim cause during the British withdrawal from India.

Delhi has two Gandhi memorials, one the site of his cremation at Raj Ghat, in a park on the banks of the Yamuna river where several other Indian leaders have since been commemorated, and the other at Birla House, in New Delhi, where he was shot.

I visited both places with friends last week, seeking to commemorate Gandhi quietly and away from the grand ceremonies that today will mark the anniversary of his death.

The site at Raj Ghat (literally the riverbank of the king or leader) was designed by Vanu G. Bhuta, an American-trained Indian architect who won the Government-sponsored competition to create a suitable memorial to Gandhi. His was a stark, modernist solution, intended to reflect the profound austerity of Gandhi’s life. The design, which was completed around 1956, is a square, sunken garden, surrounded by walls that serve as viewing platforms. In the centre of the garden is a raised, black marble slab, decorated solely with an engraving of the phrase “He Ram” [Oh God], supposedly Gandhi’s last words, and an eternal flame burning in a large lantern.

Originally the surrounding garden was red earth, but it has been changed several times since its installation and is now British-style grass punctuated with trees planted by visiting foreign dignitaries (from Queen Elizabeth II and Dwight Eisenhower to Ho Chi Minh).  When we visited last week, we admired the proportions and scale of the garden, and the way it can be experienced first in a broad sweep from above, and then intimately (and barefoot) at the memorial itself. The bright marigold petals add a typically Hindu touch (and on occasions the whole memorial is smothered in patterns of flower petals). For me, however, the dignity and repose of the space were somewhat spoilt by the bright green matting laid for mysterious reasons over many of the stone paths, and by the retractable barriers that discouraged visitors from getting too close to the memorial.

The second Gandhi memorial in Delhi is at Birla House, where Gandhi was shot. It is now a national museum, known as the Gandhi Smriti.

I had read of the footprints cast in stone marking his final walk from the house to a planned prayer meeting. But the reality was disappointing: the footprints were not, as I had imagined, gently sunken into the earth, as if preserving the exact tread of his final few steps. Instead, they are oddly raised and too numerous to bring much poignancy to the site  -  and apparently any child who sees them as an invitation to walk in Gandhi’s footsteps is quickly disabused of the idea by the museum guards. The whole site seemed to me slightly dispiriting: I’ve written elsewhere about its surfeit of information boards, and the much-trumpeted interactive displays in the house were one of the strangest museum experiences I have had.

For me, the memorial garden at Raj Ghat, ideally shorn of its bright matting and barriers, is a far finer way to commemorate the founder of the Indian nation.

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Wildlife and gardens

Having lived on three continents, I am increasingly struck by the similarities and connections between gardens in seemingly very disparate countries. What confirms my location is not the plants or the layout or the use people make of the landscape – but the wildlife.

In Massachusetts, it was raccoons trotting along the tops of fences, the mongoose on the doorstep, and the occasional skunk lurking in the shrubbery that told me I was no longer in England. [One eagle-eyed reader has pointed out that native Bostonians would have been equally amazed by the mongoose; it was probably in fact an opossum.] A friend who lived only two hours north of Boston could entertain me for hours with tales of the moose and bears in her cornfield. It was as if she was on personal terms with space aliens. When we were in Paris, I was struck by the complete absence of grey squirrels in any park or garden, even though we were under three hours by train from the squirrel-laden London parks. Now in India, it’s the monkeys who confirm I am indeed a long way from home.

Last week I spent some time up on the northern ridge, researching the impact of the British on the Indian capital. The ridge is an ancient geological feature that runs diagonally across the city and was home to various grand colonial figures in the nineteenth century, and site of much of the action during the 1857 Uprising. Originally scrubland, it has for a hundred years been managed as forest. It is neatly planted, with park benches, wide paths, fences and litter bins. In the softer light of the Indian autumn, you could almost imagine you were in the UK (although the bougainvillaea slightly gives the game away).

It’s the bundi monkeys everywhere who are the real signal. To locals they may be nuisances who rip up gardens and carry TB, but to me they are an otherworldly joy, frolicking and leaping and just gathering in big social groups, in the same way that the jaunty raccoons never failed to delight in the States, even while locals muttered about vermin and rabies.

Fellow blogger Jack at Sequoia Gardens writes about the baboons who occasionally wreak havoc in his South African garden, and I find myself relishing the unfamiliarity of his homeland in a way that descriptions of similarly native species like phygelius or crocosmia would just not achieve.

So I am grateful to our little urban monkeys, desperately displaced as they are from their native habitat by human encroachment, for reminding me daily that, despite the clipped shrubs and English-style lawn that cover so much of Delhi, this really is a different country.

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Old Mughal structures and new British lawns

In our first few weeks in India, we have seen several examples of ancient Hindu or Mughal architecture surrounded by gardens that turn out to be partly or largely twentieth century British. I’ve already posted about the controversial gardens at Lodi, from where two villages were relocated in the 1930s to allow an English-style park to be installed.

Next up, the sixteenth century Humayun’s Tomb, one of the most beautiful and significant sites in Delhi, and an inspiration for the Taj Mahal. Arranged symmetrically around the elevated marble tomb, its grounds retain the four-square layout of the traditional paradise garden. But the sandstone of the rills and many of the planting choices, although recently restored, apparently owe much to a British intervention in the first decade of the twentieth century, itself intended to correct an earlier British project that had replaced Mughal water features with Victorian circular flower beds.

The red and white marble of Humayun's garden tomb, with the sandstone rills and planting added later by the British

An aerial photograph of Humayun's Tomb, showing the grid layout of the gardens. Image on display at the site.

At the Agra Fort, a World Heritage Site 200km south of Delhi, we learnt that the lawns and planting around and within the stronghold (which was constructed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) were again put in place by the Brits, establishing grass and shrubs where formerly had been paved and carpeted gathering spaces.

British shrubs and grass at the Agra Fort

Twentieth century lawn inserted among seventeenth century buildings at the Agra Fort

The Taj Mahal was also influenced by its time under British management. While the exact layout and planting of its original gardens in the seventeenth century are not known, there are early descriptions of the monument surrounded by a profusion of roses, daffodils and fruit trees. As part of a major conservation programme, the gardens were replanted in 1903 in a more Western style, with lawns and clumps of trees.

Irregular clumps of trees and lawn adjacent to the Taj Mahal

English-style grass long established in the grounds of the Taj Mahal

All these horticultural and design changes were part of well-meaning efforts to restore or enhance crumbling historic sites. Some would now argue that much of this work was inappropriate, examples of misguided attempts at restoration by people who did not understand the culture of the country or the history of its landscapes. (It makes me wonder which conservation projects of today will in future years be seen as ill-judged or unwise, introducing incongruous elements or removing historically significant features.)

Yet gardens are always going to change over time. For me, one of their joys is the layers of history that they contain, with designs and planting from different periods jostling and intermingling around the largely static architecture. The British are just one of many influences on Indian landscapes, and there is a certain pleasure in seeing their (our) brief, particular impact.

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Lodi Gardens

We are ten days into our three-year Indian sojourn and finding much to enjoy, and much that has us floundering.

Yesterday, in soul-sapping heat, we visited one of our local parks in New Delhi, the Lodi Gardens. At first, it looks simply like a lush green area amid the chaos of the city. There are venerable old trees, whose names we are just learning – the ashoka, with brilliant orange flowers, the fragrant neem, and the banyan, with its fat aerial roots. Among the lawns at Lodi are beds of cannas and other exotic plants, and some clipped little shrubs that look to me rather stumpy and mean in the great sweep of grass.

And then suddenly, as we turned a corner, we found the heart of the Lodi Gardens. Among the greenery are a number of unutterably beautiful stone monuments. The names and history of these ancient garden tombs, mosques, walls, gateways and bridges mean little to us as yet, but helpful signs told us that some were constructed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by the Sayyid and Lodi dynasties, and that some are later, Mughal structures.

Lodi is in the midst of a major programme of preservation. But nothing is being made shiny and new. Instead the work is retaining the ancient character of the monuments by just carefully conserving what is left.

The 90-acre gardens themselves were a much later creation, added by the British during the Raj. Lady Willingdon, wife of the British Viceroy, decided that parkland would be nice around these ancient monuments, and in in 1936 had the two surrounding villages removed, and the undulating lawn and pathways of a typical English park installed in their place. Apparently in the 1960s the gardens were re-landscaped with help from American designer Garrett Eckbo.

And so Lodi reflects many of the dynasties and cultural influences that have shaped this great city; today it is one of the most popular parks in New Delhi, and one  that I am sure we shall grow to love.

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The park of the future?

The city of Paris has admirable policies on biodiversity, climate change and other ‘green’ issues. Previously I’ve blogged about how these policies are playing out in the capital’s public parks – arguably in a rather clumsy way at the grand parc Monceau, and more successfully at a pleasant new neighbourhood park in the 11th arrondissement.

But here is an example of a full-on sustainable park, recently completed in an area of the 13th arrondissement that is undergoing major, innovative urban renewal. Underpinning the development work is an environmental charter that covers “water, waste, ground and sub-ground, energy, noise, journeys, urban landscape and governance.”

The park itself, known by the rather awkward name les jardins des Grands Moulins – Abbé Pierre, was designed by landscape architects Ah Ah to showcase “la conquête végétale” [the triumph of plant life], with vegetation spilling over paths, seeding between paving stones, spreading into ponds and clambering up walls. It has two distinct areas: a series of terraced meadows on one side, and a mosaic of different habitats on the other, from pond and bog to meadow and forest under storey.

Rainwater is collected from neighbouring rooftops and channelled down pipes and along open gullies or rills in the park, through the various ponds and marsh areas, and then down to a vast underground storage tank, from where it is used for irrigation.

Sketch of the water distribution system at les Grands Moulins, from an exhibition at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine

We visited a couple of weeks ago, after six weeks of unusually hot, dry weather. I found it difficult to form a clear opinion of the park: on the one hand, it has admirable ambitions as a sustainable landscape, demonstrates the green credentials of the city far more than policy documents and statements ever can, and is for all of us an example for the future.

There were some lovely design touches, like the curving boardwalk engraved with messages about the park’s sustainable features, and the sinuous pedestrian bridge that invites you up to view the park from above.

On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine what you are meant to DO in this park, apart from admire how sustainable it all is. My eight-year-old proclaimed it ‘boring’ and I could sort of see what she meant. The water channels were dry and the pond area murky and slightly smelly. The only other child present during our visit was poking round rather disconsolately with a stick. You couldn’t really sit on the grass, and the planting was all environmentally-sound species like clover and prairie-style grasses, with little that was sensually arresting. Despite its claims of encouraging biodiversity, the park’s the only obvious wildlife was some fat feral pigeons waddling round, and we can see those pretty much anywhere.

Maybe the shortcoming was mine, but  les jardins des Grands Moulins – Abbé  Pierre somehow felt almost like the Emperor’s New Clothes…

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