Our Serbian garden & Russian landscape design

     We live now in Serbia, in a  magnificent place on the mountain surounded by woods and fields. We have a small parcel of land with an old garden which is waiting for its renovation. Trying to imagin the new life of this garden we looked through a lot of materials: mordern magazines and old volumes. 

      The project of renovation should be  throughly considered  and the previous exprience can be of rather limited use because of climate, landscape and soil differences. 

      Looking through variois publications I found a material about Andrey Bolotov, whose researches in the art of creating park and gardens can be of great value now inspite of the fact that he lived in the XVIII century.

     Andrey Bolotov was the farther-founder of Russian landscape design. Actually he was an outstanding scientists and had more than 300 publications. In Europe his name is well known, his work is highly evaluated in the sphere of landscape design, in particular.

       He knew very well decorative plants - trees, bushes, flowers - and created a magnificent park for the Russian imperor. Bolotov was also a talented painter, made a series of watercolors of this park and presented  them to Katherine the Great. 

       Practically all his life he lived in his homestead Dvoryaninovo (about 150 kms from Moscow). Today there is a nice museum, the forest and banks of the river still remind about  the beautiful park in the English style park that was created by thw owner of Dvoryaninovo more than 200 years ago.

Parks of Alhambra - a unique landscape design

     Alhambra- is a magnificent fortress and parks, founded by Mohammed I in XIII century. This site became a royal residence in XV-XVI centuries. In 1984 Alhambra was included in the UNESCO list of the world cultural heritage.

     Parks of Alhambra present a unique creation of the landscape design art. In a divine way they comишту regular classical gardens (which were developed in XVIII century), English parks (which seem close to nature and became popular since XIX century) and daedal asymmetric Eastern gardens, known from the ancient hanging gardens of Babylon. 

     It seems amazingly that the beauty of Alhambra parks are created mostly with rather common flowers: daisies, marigolds, nasturtiums.