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.

One approach to sustainable garden design

The India Habitat Centre recently hosted an event led by noted French landscape architect Pascal Cribier. Called Garden, Nature or Landscape?, the workshop allowed Cribier to explain his design approach through a variety of projects.

For me, the most fascinating part of the day was Cribier’s description of what ecological design means to him. (He spoke poetically and passionately on the subject in his broken English, and would I suspect not entirely approve of this short and rather prosaic Anglo-Saxon summary of his views.)

Put simply, Cribier argued for the conservation of gardens. Not conservation in the usual sense of meticulously recording and expensively safeguarding important historical features; but conservation simply in the sense of keeping as much as possible of what was already on site. He does not believe in adding to landfill by ripping out plants and materials just to impose his own design on a garden. Instead he strives to keep what is there and just amend it. He gave the simple example of a brick wall which he did not like; instead of replacing it, he used the same bricks to build a wall in a different style. A more flamboyant example was a fussy little Victorian water feature he found in the garden he was redesigning at Woolton House in England, which he extended into a far more effective large pond while keeping the original feature at the centre.

A conserved but transformed water feature at Woolton House. Image from www.etab.ac-caen.fr

There was a second, equally important, part of this approach. Cribier also strives to create a design that will last, that will not in its turn get ripped out as uninspiring or too difficult to maintain. He almost starts with what he considers a realistic maintenance plan and works backwards. And his focus is on producing something that the owner and gardener will love and want to maintain; in this way the garden is more likely to persist.

Several of the young Indian landscape architects in the room pressed him on his use of non-native plants. But Cribier was unrepentant: it was ecologically more important to give clients a pleasurable garden that they would love and preserve, than to strive to recreate some lost ecosystem. He argued that nature is self-balancing, able to cope with disruption and change, and not in need of frantic attempts to return to what has been lost. To be fair, he did say that if France’s native flora was as beautiful as India’s, his attitude would be rather different; but providing enduring beauty was more important than a focus on native plants.

It was a fascinating account of one individual’s approach; not one I am sure I fully support (and certainly his argument that bees will visit hybridised double flowers as readily as native single ones seemed based on nothing more than a fervent wish that they should), but one which left all of us pondering on what really is good ecological practice in garden design.

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.

American modernism in Delhi

The US architect Joseph Allen Stein (1912 – 2001) spent the last forty years of his professional life in India. A man driven by humanitarian and environmental passions, he worked on cooperative and low-cost social housing in California and then, troubled by McCarthyism, he took up work in Calcutta and later Delhi, exhilarating in the idealism and socialist enthusiasm of India as it emerged from almost a century of colonial British rule.

Inspired by the work of modernist architect Richard Neutra and others, Stein has been described as “building in the garden” – using the wider natural landscape to inspire appropriate structures made from local materials. He characterised his approach as “modern regionalism” and it can perhaps be seen as a precursor of today’s achingly trendy landscape urbanism movement.

Yesterday we visited one of Stein’s major buildings, the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi. Designed in the late 1980s, this is a place that provides office, conference and exhibition space for organisations working on habitat- and environment-related issues.

The design reminded me forcibly of London’s Barbican. It is monumental in scale, with concrete structures arranged in vast horizontal and vertical slabs, laid out around large airy courtyards, linked together by stairs and walkways. Given the heat of the Indian summer, many of the exterior spaces are shaded by delicate blue patio covers, casting intricate shadows and further blurring the distinction between inside and out. The courtyards are planted with a pleasing array of greenery – large pots and beds of evergreen shrubs and tall trees, providing a more human feel and scale amongst the concrete monumentality. Although rarely credited, Stein’s wife Margaret was responsible for much of the interior and planting design in his work, and the successful combination of their two styles is well illustrated at the Habitat Centre.

It was Stein who brought Garrett Eckbo to Delhi to work on Lodi Gardens (about which I blogged below), and who also designed the splendid American Embassy school attended by my daughter. Joe and Margaret Stein are a couple whose work I intend to research further.

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.

All the world’s a stage…

The théâtre de verdure du jardin Shakespeare is a delightful open air theatre in the Bois de Boulogne, to the west of Paris. Last month we saw Macbeth there in a dramatic performance by the Tower Theatre Company. It was my 8-year-old daughter’s first taste of Shakespeare and, after grappling with the arcane language for a while, she declared it enjoyable.

I very much liked the setting, with its different areas planted to represent various Shakespeare scenes – from a heath for Macbeth’s witches and the brook where Ophelia drowns to a woodland for a Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The stage itself is a splendid affair, with a mass of different entrances and exits, and all sorts of narrow paths and steps for the cast to gamble around. Underfoot is gravel, which apparently requires daily sword fight practice to avoid the characters loosing their footing and producing rather more “blood and death” than intended. Altogether it is a delightful enclosed space, worth a visit even if no performance is scheduled.

As a Brit in Paris, I think a post about Shakespeare in the Bois de Boulogne is as good a way as any to pause this blog for a while. We leave France in a couple of days and, after some time in the UK, will be setting off for our new adventure in India in early August. I hope very much to return in the autumn with stories of Mughal landscapes and colonial parks and ancient garden tombs…

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…