DIVINE. Venice, Italy.

Details. In a gothic palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, minute details make more real than reality buds of flowers, palms, pink flamingos, fish, monkeys and Mexicans sleeping under big sombreros. Their accuracy is even more remarkable given their small sizes. Funny pins, but also opulent necklaces and fancy bracelets, around 350 pieces part of a private collection of Costume Jewelry on display at the Galleria Giorgio Franchetti at Cà d'Oro.

No precious stones or gold but materials such as Bakelite, plexiglass or acrylic cleverly cut and decorated.
The first costume jewelry appeared in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. It triumphed later in America, around the 1930s, when important designers created these optimistic, joyful and affordable accessories for a flourishing market. Hollywood stars, such as Greta Garbo and Bette Davies, showed off eccentric pieces of costume jewelry in historical mega-productions, contributing to its success.

The pieces on display in Venice were created between 1930 and 1970.  Nature is a preferite subject but not the only one, as some of the titles of the different sections reveal: 'Patriots and crowns,' 'Timeless Mughul jewelry,' 'Masks and men,' 'Ah-h-h-h the Tropics' and, of course, 'From the enchanted garden' and 'The wonder of the animal kingdom.'

They make you dream, witty, sparkling, coloured, exaggerated, absolutely unnecessary.

Section 'Just for fun' closes the exhibition.

Photos:
TravelinaGarden, Cà d'Oro, Venice, December 2014.

Links:
DIVINE.  Splendori di scena. Gioielli Fantasia dalla Collezione di Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
30.08.2014 - 11.01.2015  Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Cà d'Oro. Venice. 
http://www.cadoro.org/exhibitions-and-events/

 

Which flowers in the Sackler atrium this week?

Fresh flowers welcome visitors in the atrium of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington D.C. Every day.
Ms. Else Sackler, artist and first wife of the museum's founder, left a special fund to provide the Gallery with fresh flower arrangements. A generous and important gesture, a polite invitation to forget everything and immerse yourself in the soft light and in the refined collections of the Gallery. 

Since 1997, Mr. Cheyenne Kim, horticultural specialist of the museum, is the creator of these amazing displays. Born in Japan in 1941, passionate about orchids, Mr. Kim was educated in the ancient art of ikebana, the japanese art of flower arrangement.

Inspired by nature and guided by the rules of ikebana, Mr. Kim works silently, attentive to shapes and structure, to lines and form, to the relationship between the vase and the vegetal material. Lights and colour combinations are wisely used to complete a picture not easily forgotten even by those that, like me, do not know the language of ikebana.

I took these pictures last year in November. I met Mr. Kim while he was finishing his work. He was sweeping around the compositions but answered politely to my questions, and, after a last glance, he left the Gallery. Many new flowers have been displayed in the Gallery since then.
Does anyone know which flowers are in the Sackler atrium this week? 

Photos:
TravelinaGarden, Sackler Gallery, Washington, November 2013.

Links:
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1050 Independence Ave SW, Washington, D.C.
http://www.asia.si.edu/

Записки охотника, Sketches from a Hunter's Album, Ivan Sergeevic Turgenev.

Охотники на привале, Hunters at Rest. 1871. Vasily Perov (1833-1882).

I was waiting for the sun to shine on green apples and orange persimmons, for the smell of olea fragrans under my bedroom window, for the blooming of autumn crocuses under the cherry tree. I was waiting for the first days of autumn to read Sketches from a Hunter's Album.

The book, published in 1852, is a collection of twenty-five short stories written, between 1847 and 1850, by the Russian novelist Ivan Sergeevic Turgenev (1818-1883) for the Russian journal The Contemporary. He was abroad in this period, travelling in Germany and France, and the unexpected success of these hunting stories situated in the Russian countryside gave him new strength and determination to pursue his literary ambitions.

Сборы на охоту, Preparation for Hunting. 1836.

A passionate hunter himself, Turgenev found inspiration in life at Spasskoye-Lutovinovo, the family's estate near Oryol, a town 360 kilometres southwest of Moscow. Rural life: sky and clouds, woods, fields, hay, narrow dusty paths, flocks of birds, 'eggs, milk and rye bread.' And people. In his hunting expeditions, the hunter meets landowners, administrators and, above all, the multitude of serfs that lived and worked in their properties. He shares with them frugal food and nights under the stars, talking and listening to their stories. He observes them, describing with minute details faces, clothes and izbas, intentions and gestures, tragic destinies marked by the absurd decisions of despotic and cruel landowners, and quiet and hard-working families. If hunting literature was a successful literary genre in Russia in the 1840s, Turgenev’s choice was not obvious: no sentimental and pathetic tones, no stereotypes about peasant life or judgements, just the reality told with the serfs' words. He considers them people, a revolutionary idea that would lead to the abolition of serfdom in 1861.

Turgenev describes a world that was disappearing relying on unheard voices and on the beauty of the Russian countryside. The golden leaves of linden trees in a foggy day of autumn move on the page. But it is not just autumn. A sudden storm, the unbearable heat of a summer afternoon, the first light at dawn in a spring day, Turgenev's words reveal his passionate love for nature. Hunting was part of it, a tradition that put man in touch with nature, with untamed nature. Birch woods, old orchards and a vegetable garden in autumn:

Рука с цветами, A Hand with Flowers. 1896.
Mikhail Nesterov (1862-1942).

".... A recently cleared path quickly let us out of the lime grove and we entered a vegetable garden. Amid old apple trees and overgrown gooseberry bushes there grew innumerable round pale-green heads of cabbage with hop tendrils winding round their tall stems; sticking up in the beds were close-set rows of brown sticks all entwined with peas; large flat pumpkins literally lay about on the ground; cucumbers hung yellowing under dusty angular leaves; tall nettles sway above the fence; in two or three places there grew masses of wild honeysuckle, elder and dog rose, the remains of what had formerly been well-kept flowerbeds."
from My neighbour Radilov.

осень в деревне,
 Autumn in a Village. 1942. Mikhail Nesterov (1862-1942).

Further reading:

Осенний пейзаж,  
Autumn Landscape. 1934. Mikhail Nesterov (1862-1942).

Sketches from a Hunter's Album, Ivan Turgenev, Penguin UK.

Paintings:

Охотники на привале, Hunters at Rest. 1871. Oil on canvas. Vasily Perov (1833–1882).
http://commons.wikimedia.org/

Сборы на охоту, Preparation for Hunting. 1836. Oil on canvas. Evgraf Feodorovich Krendovsky (1810-1870s, unknown).

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 
Рука с цветами, A Hand with Flowers. Study for the Painting On the Hills. 1896. Oil on canvas. Mikhail Nesterov (1862-1942)
http://www.abcgallery.com/N/nesterov/nesterov18.html
Осенний пейзаж, Autumn Landscape. 1934. Oil on canvas. Mikhail Nesterov (1862-1942).
http://www.wikiart.org/
осень в деревне, Autumn in a Village, 1942, Oil on canvas. Mikhail Nesterov (1862-1942).
http://www.wikiart.org/

Some distinguished people and their coats of arms.

André Le Nôtre (1613–1700), French gardener, very famous French gardener. Ennobled in 1681.

Son and grandson of gardeners, apprentice of the royal painter Simon Vouet, gifted designer of the King's gardens, Le Nôtre was a simple and modest man. To King Louis XIV who wanted to give him a coat of arms, he candidly replied that he already had it: 'three snails crowned by the head of a cabbage. Sir, he added, could I forget my spade? How much must it be dear to me? Isn't to it that I owe all the kindness of which your Majesty honors me?'

Carl von Linné (1707-1761), Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist. Ennobled in 1761.

The eminent naturalist conceived his own coat of arms with: 'my Linnea in the elm, in the shield three fields, black, red and green, the three kingdoms of nature (mineral, animal and vegetable), and thereon, an egg cut in half, or an halved egg, to betoken nature which is continued and perpetuated in an egg.'

His drawing was considered too poor and Daniel Tilas, the national herald, provided a more elegant version. In a letter to Tilas in November 1762, Linnaeus gratefully writes about it, remarking with pleasure the inclusion of his beloved flower, the Linnaea borealis, asking the ostrich feathers to be removed (probably from the crest) and to be allowed to divide the escutcheon into three fields and different colours. He also asks Tilas to choose between the cross and the rays, and to place one of them in the middle of the small egg.
Linnaeus, or von Linné after his ennoblement, chose the following motto: FAMAM EXTENDERE FACTIS (To Expand Fame by Deeds).

Sir Joseph Paxton (1803-1865), English gardener and architect. Knighted in 1851.

Born in a humble family, self-educated, Head Gardener and later Manager of the Duke of Devonshire's estates, Paxton shaped the grounds with lakes and arboreta, planted collections of trees, experimented with new flowers, built fountains and greenhouses, and published magazines. 

He was kinghted by Queen Victoria for his project of the Crystal Palace, the innovative building in glass and cast iron, inspired by the structure of the leaves of the Victoria amazonica, designed for the Great Exhibition held in London in 1851. 

Does this plan of the grounds of the Crystal Palace, dated 1857, seem a coat of arms, doesn't it?

Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944), British architect. Knighted in 1918.

Educated at home because of ill-health, Sir Lutyens began to attend the Kensington School of Art in 1885 for two years, then he was paying apprentice in the office of Ernest George and Peto for one year, and eventually opened his own practice in 1888. He designed country houses, churches, gardens, bridges, commercial buildings, art galleries, war cemeteries, monuments, furniture, including beautiful lighting, and New Delhi.

In his coat of arms, designed in 1936, the capital of the column is in the Delhi order. Sir Lutyens created this new architectural order during his works to plan the imperial capital of New Delhi between 1912 and 1930.  He designed simple classical columns with a band of vertical ridges in the capital and small bells carved at each corner, combining the Greek Doric order with Indian elements. His bells were inspired by those at the entrance of Hindu temples whose sound prepare devotees for prayers and meditation, but, his pendant bells are silent. Did he use them to give the new buildings a solemn touch or perhaps to protect the British empire? According to an Indian legend, in fact, ringing bells announce the fall of dynasties.
His motto: METIENDO VIVENDUM (By Measure We Live).




Links:
The Linnean Correspondence
http://linnaeus.c18.net/Letter/L3161
Lutyens Furniture & Lighting Blog (Lutyens' coat of arms)
http://www.lutyens-furniture.com/blog/january-2012/

To answer your questions....Lucia Nusiner, agronomist and landscape designer, Studio GPT, Bergamo, Italy.

The top of old trees reveals the presence of a garden beyond an anonymous gate not far from Piazza Vecchia, the Old Square in Bergamo Alta, a medieval town perched on a hill some 40 km northeast of Milan. Works to build the underground garage, a convenient solution in a town whose narrow cobbled streets seem more suitable to knights and horses than vans and small cars, compromised many of the existing trees and prompted the idea of a new garden.

Today, the secluded and shady atmosphere of the mature wood has given way to a sunny terrace, developed on two levels, with green and floral masses, ripe tomatoes, strawberries and unexpected views of roofs just beyond the balustrade. The garden is an elegant and ordered composition, a sequence of themed areas divided by walls and hedges, linked by soft green lawn and crunchy gravel paths. The old surviving trees are incorporated in the new formal frame made of boxwood and hornbeam hedges, whose height and shape enclose and control the different spaces of the garden without closing them completely.

It is a flower garden. From the shady garden at the entrance to the flower borders, namely, two parallel rectangular borders in the main terrace and a row of three square-shaped borders in the smaller upper terrace, each space is richly planted from spring to autumn. Combinations of roses, different varieties of hydrangea, ornamental grasses and perennials in a cool palette are arranged with particular attention to shapes and textures. Autumn has patches of tall white anemone japonica opposed to the greenish white globes of  hydrangeas and shiny boxwoods in the shady garden. In the flower borders, arching plumes of pennisetums, airy lavender flowers of the verbena bonariensis, different varieties of starry asters and clusters of sedum are arranged behind the woolly leaves of stachys lanata.  

Near the balustrade, four raised vegetable plots offer herbs and encouraging experiments with tomatoes, zucchini and cabbages. Not far, a young espalier pear tree grows against a wall.

Two wooden benches invite to rest at the end of the terrace, a secret corner where water flows in a stone basin and young grape vines climb a simple pergola, a promise of future grapes, shade and privacy.

Here, a row of round boxwoods of decreasing sizes line the balustrade like living sculptures, echoed in the traditional globe finials of the staircase to the upper terrace.

There are no vases of regal geranium on its steps. Garden ornaments are essential, elegant and rustic, practical and beautiful at the same time, such as the intertwined branches used in different part of the garden or the warm colour and rough surface of the stone walls.

It is a  horizontal scene quiet and relaxing, suspended, closer to the sky than to the busy valley beyond the balustrade, anchored to the steep hill by the firm roots of the old trees.

 
I visited this garden in September and loved its balance between old and new, formal and natural. I asked Lucia Nusiner, the landscape designer of the Studio GPT in Bergamo who designed it, some questions and she kindly answered me.

Travel in a Garden: The garden you designed has been thought after the long works to create the underground garage that compromised the existing wood. Which are the main difficulties met in its implementation?

Lucia Nusiner: At the beginning, it was difficult to overcome the customer's bad memories, sometimes exacerbated by the construction works and by the ill-treatment of her beloved trees, trying, at the same time, to create private areas on several fronts among different neighbours. It was also difficult trying to eliminate some of the pointless trees, such as the larch that still exists. Then, it took long time to transport materials to this garden located in a narrow street in the Città Alta (Upper Town).

Travel in a Garden: The decision to include lawn, topiary and hedges of hornbeam, far from the prevailing models of naturalistic gardens, was born from the customer's specific requirements, the atmosphere of the ancient town, or other practical needs and personal preferences?

Lucia Nusiner: The customer clearly asked for an English style garden. She is very fond of it, especially of the gardens seen during a trip to the Cotswolds. I love English style too, and, I thought that this garden could be an interesting place to harmonize it. Besides, I created more rooms in the garden with hornbeam and boxwood.


Travel in a Garden: The curbs of twigs have an antique flavor (chestnut or hazel?) and are useful and decorative, perfect for the raised beds of the vegetable garden that have a prominent position along the terrace. Is their use related to local traditions or to the vegetable garden that already existed in the property?

Lucia Nusiner: The curbs are made of hazel, more durable than willow, less than chestnut but more subtle and elegant of the latter. I proposed the vegetable garden where it was, but with raised beds, using willow, easier and more designed.

Travel in a Garden: In these days of early autumn, clumps of grasses and violet and pinkish perennials prevail in the garden. But the yellows, oranges and reds have been banned? No reblooming orange roses along the pergola where vigorous banksia roses stretch? What about the spring flowers?

Lucia Nusiner: I always ask the customers about the colours and flowers they like and dislike. In this case, the answer, which I share, was pastel shades: purple, pink, fuchsia, lilac, white, cool tones and not warm colours.

Travel in a Garden: Have you planned any changes in the flower beds after the experience of this first year? Which are the plans for the garden in the near future?

Lucia Nusiner: I love to go back to the gardens to see how they grow and change. I take photographs and advice the customer and gardener about improvements and changes if necessary. At the moment, the garden is young and we wait for it to grow. Missing a small round table on the corner of the greenhouse, which I definitely must remember to tell the customer.

(translation TravelinaGarden)

Photos:
TravelinaGarden, Bergamo, September 2014.

Notes:

Private garden visited during the 'Photography Workshop with Marianne Majerus' held in Bergamo  during the 'International Meeting of the Landscape and Garden I Maestri del Paesaggio', 6-21 September 2014, Bergamo, Italy.

http://www.studiogpt.it/i-maestri-del-paesaggio_en.html

Links:
Lucia Nusiner - Studio GPT giardini paesaggio territorio, Bergamo, Italy.
http://www.studiogpt.it/index_en.html

Cecil Ross Pinsent and the garden ornaments at Villa La Foce, Chianciano Terme, Italy.

Standing in front of the dolphin fountain in the garden near the house at Villa La Foce, Benedetta Origo recalled one of her mother’s letter dated 1929. Writing to a friend, Iris Origo imagined a fountain where, looking from her bedroom window, she saw a hole in a sea of mud. Right there, Cecil Ross Pinsent, English architect and family friend, designed the simple, small fountain we see today, transforming the muddy courtyard in an elegant garden framed by walls and hedges.

Cecil Ross Pinsent (1884-1963) was involved in the works to renovate the villa and the surrounding farm buildings from the very beginning, from 1924, when Iris Cutting (1902-1988) and Antonio Origo (1891-1976) bought this estate in Val d’Orcia, southern Tuscany. They moved in the following year, soon after their marriage, with a project to renovate the neglected buildings and reclaim the surrounding barren land creating better conditions of life for the local people. The garden was created in different stages between 1925 and 1939, a sequence of formal terraces that, from a side of the villa halfway up a steep hill, spread towards the valley.

Pinsent followed every detail of the works, garden ornaments included. Between 1930 and 1939, he designed basins, fountains, vases, seats and tables, simple and clean shapes hand carved by skillful craftsmen in a local limestone, the travertine, appreciated for its roughness and neutral colour.

Travertine vases edge the roof of the limonaia in the entrance courtyard and continue along the external wall that separated the garden from the old road. For the limonaia, the traditional building where citrus pots are stored in winter, Pinsent conceived elegant proportions and large French windows, similar to those of the main villa.
Frail plants are still sheltered there in the coldest months of the year, and, in summer, while the terracotta vases are arranged in rigorous order on marble plinths in the lemon garden, its empty rooms become a cool refuge in front of the swimming pool.

The lemon garden is one of the 'rooms' created along the straight path that connects the small garden with the dolphin fountain near the house to a large terrace overlooking the lower garden and the valley. The rococo style fountain, with the two playful eighteenth century dolphins in the centre, was one of Pinsent's first works, while the lower garden under the terrace one of his last additions. Here, a fountain with three basins of decreasing size, like open flowers, is nested in an artificial grotto, a cool and tall room obtained under the terrace. Opposite to the grotto, separated by box-edge parterres and green lawn, the calm water of a geometrical basin mirrors the top of cypresses and an ample decorated stone seat, topped by the statue of a Caucasian carrying working tools. This statue is paired by that of a Moor with a cornucopia overflowing with grapes and fruit at the top of the hill, surrounded by the wood.

The two mysterious men, with their loads placed on the shoulders and a cloth knotted around the hips, look away in opposite directions. They could be seen as allegories of the seasons, of Nature and Art, or of East and West, but, probably, they were purchased just as beautiful decorative elements, without any particular meaning.










The two statues are catalogued by the Fondazione Cini in Venice as works of Orazio Marinali (1643-1720), an Italian sculptor who worked in Veneto, a region in north-eastern Italy, in the eighteenth century. They were part of the increasing number of antique statues available in the local market at the beginning of the twentieth century, prompted by a renewed interest in formal gardens.

Recent studies, promoted by the Fondazione Cini, explore the history of garden sculptures created in Veneto during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and later moved to other Italian regions or abroad. In particular, a section focuses on the experience of the sophisticated Anglo-American community that lived in Florence in this period, of which Pinsent and the Origos were part. Their gardens interpreted Renaissance style, with its symmetry and perfect proportions, terraces, water, evergreens and stonework, mediating it with more contemporary needs. Statues were valued mainly for their aesthetic qualities, used to create pleasant and curious focal points, often as single elements or in small groups, whose iconography was not important. An idea that seems confirmed by the same Pinsent in an article written for the magazine Il Giardino Fiorito in June 1931: Giardini moderni all'italiana con i fiori che più vi si adattano (Modern Italian Gardens with the Flowers that Best Suit Them), an interesting document to understand his approach to garden design, otherwise documented only by photos and drawings.

In this article, he analyses the structure and composition of Italian gardens without lingering, however, over statues or other decorations, stating that they have to be included in gardens only if 'truly remarkable'. He favours the creation of seats or 'free space' in the different areas of the garden 'to suggest the idea of pause and rest,' but not along the pergola intended
 as 'an outdoor corridor not to be used as pure and simple decoration.'
Pinsent proposes the maquette of the fourteenth-century Tuscan garden presented at the Mostra del Giardino Italiano as the perfect example of a small and simple garden with pergola. This was one of the ten models of gardens made of wood, glass and terracotta (size two metres for three) that, together with photos, paintings, prints and other material, were on display in the Salone dei Cinquecento at Palazzo Vecchio in Florence in 1931 for the first 'Exhibition of the Italian Garden'. Supported by the Fascist regime, this exhibition aimed to draw the attention of common people on this invaluable heritage, and to stimulate a new approach for its study, conservation and restoration by Italian scholars.

By that time, Pinsent, who had left a promising but perhaps less exciting career in London in 1907, was successfully expanding his activity in the surroundings of Florence. He worked for new buildings, alterations to existing villas, drainage and baroque stairs, libraries, wall frescoes and gardens. Different activities that reflected his personal inclinations and interests, but also an architectural education based on the combination of practical skills and traditional knowledge influenced by the words and example of eminent English architects, and supporters of formal gardens, such as Reginald Bloomfield (1856-1942) and Charles Edward Mallows (1864-1915). Pinsent found in Italy the most congenial place to develop his creativity, but, increasingly uncomfortable with the Fascist regime, he left Florence just before the beginning of World War II. He would return in 1943 as an officer in the Monument, Fine Arts, and Archive Commissions and, after the war, annually to visit his old clients and friends, such as Iris and Antonio Origo at Villa La Foce.
 

There are no seats along the winding pergola at Villa La Foce, but stone seats are strategically placed in different areas of the garden. Volutes and curved lines of garden ornaments contrast with the sharp lines of clipped hedges and parterres, while vertical lines echo those of the surrounding cypresses. There is order, symmetry and surprise in the garden, a wood by the boundaries, unexpected views, walls, hedges and flowers, as Pinsent recommended. And, the refreshing sound of water.

 

Photos:
TravelinaGarden, La Foce, September 2013.

Link:
Villa La Foce, Chianciano Terme
 www.lafoce.com

Fondazione Cini, Venezia
http://www.cini.it/en/

A short original video about the models of the Italian gardens presented at the Mostra del Giardino Italiano held in Florence in 1931: A Firenze esposizione dei modelli di giardini italiani, Archivio Storico Luce.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ApnxFdVRZo

Further reading:
Clarke, Ethne. An Infinity of Graces,  W.W. Norton&Company, New York, 2013.

De Vincenti, Monica, Simone Guerriero, Per un Atlante della statuaria veneta da giardino. VI

http://www.cini.it/en/publications/scultura-nei-giardini-delle-ville-venete-il-territorio-vicentino

Fabiani Giannetto, Raffaella. '"Grafting the Edelweiss on Cactus Plants": The 1931 Italian Garden Exhibition and Its Legacy', in Clio in the Italian Garden, Twenty-First–Century Studies in Historical Methods and Theoretical Perspectives, eds Mirka Beneš and Michael G. Lee, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington D.C., 2007.

Origo, Benedetta, Morna Livingston, Laurie Olin, and John Dixon Hunt. La Foce A Garden and Landscape in Tuscany, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2001.

Pinsent, Cecil. 'Giardini moderni all'italiana con i fiori che più vi si adattano', in Il Giardino Fiorito, Società Italiana Amici dei fiori, Firenze, Giugno 1931: 69-73.