Gardening in Spain

Garden of the Generalife, Granada.

Gardening in Spain reflects the different stylistic stamps of the art of Spanish culture, demonstrating influence from the Roman and Islamic gardens, the Italian, French and English gardens and, more recently the avant-garde and the use of 20th century technologies. Modern Spanish gardening emphasizes gardening and its location in its surroundings, focusing heavily on both urban horticulture and landscape architecture.

The Spanish garden is impacted by the climate and orography. The ground is generally drier than in its neighboring countries of Portugal and France. The solar radiation is more intense during the summer months, which led to the creation of smaller gardens. These small gardens are limited to enclosed spaces and has not been an adopted style of landscape in other countries.[1]

There are many historical parks and gardens in Spain, all full of character and elegance like the botanic gardens. The majority of these typologies of Islamic inheritance, arose in the Renaissance, between the 16th and 17th centuries. In the case of the Pazos Galician, although there are previous traces, the best realizations are of the baroque period during the 18th century. Up until the 19th century, the majority of gardens were promoted by the royalty and the aristocracy. This was until the social changes gestados between the 18th and 19th centuries that facilitated the creation of parks and public gardens for the use and enjoyment of all the citizens. The 20th century has evolved its urban gardening, as well as bringing greater social awareness to the ecology that has comported the creation of projects, increasingly linked to the natural surroundings.

Roman period

Modern vision of a Roman villa.

The first traces of the practice of gardening in Spain came from the Roman period. The conquest of the Iberian peninsula by the roman Republic was initiated in the course of the Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC), although it did not end until the time of Augusto. Ancient Rome was very advanced in regards to its architecture and engineering. Their knowledge of gardening advanced with their diverse infrastructures of bridges and aqueducts. The Romans were one of the first civilizations that awarded big importance to the gardening, to which elevated the category of art to that of science. As well as in other previous civilizations, the gardens had religious purpose and were evocations of the paradise —the "holy garden"—, in Rome this function became secular and ornamental. The roman garden received the influence of the oriental gardens, as well as of the Greeks, not by real models, but by the reflection in the Greek painting of landscape. In the Roman period, the work of the gardening specialized and arose the figure of the topiarius or "paisajista", which commissioned the material conception like intellectual and aesthetics of the garden.[2]

The Romans had big agricultural knowledges, and perfected numerous technicians of crop, as well as tools of labranza. Besides, they perfected a large extent of the hydraulic engineering that allowed them to ensure the contribution regulated water to the crops and gardens. Due to this they were able to make possible construction of structures that dealt with water, like swimming pools, bathrooms and lakes, that in numerous occasions added ornamental character and emphasized the beauty of the gardens.[3]

The garden was linked to the domus, the house prototípica roman, where it was usual to have a portico of entrance decorated with sculptures, that gave access to a garden of Mediterranean vegetation. This model could give so much in the city as in the field, where arose the villa, a rustic farm that generally served to accommodate middle-class civilians, and that gave so much to the gardening in the most domestic field like the agricultural exploitation. Generally, the urban gardens were organized around a playground (atrium), of form peristilada, configured symmetrically around a longitudinal axis, that served like link of communication between the distinct zones of the house. In the center of the playground, there used to be a pozo, source or lake, and the vegetal elements complemented with decorative details like mosaics, vases or statues, and often the walls were decorated with paintings to the fresco of subject paisajista. The rural villas presented two zones of ajardinamiento: intensive in the nearest enclosure to the house, with fences recortados and trees podados, flowers of season, sources and statues; and extensivo in the most agricultural zone, of irregular outline, with zones of crop and of forest.[4]

The gardens were used to have structural and architectural elements like porticos and criptopórticos, arches and columns, exedras, swimming pools, wooden kiosks, pergolas, arbours, and even artificial grottos (ninfeos), elements that happened to back traditions gardeners.[5] Regarding the vegetation, was used to group in arriates that purchased diverse forms, of which one of the most usual was the one of the hippodrome. The water ran in abundance through channels and pilones, sometimes with small jets; this type of drivings of water received the name of euripo, by the narrow homónimo that separates Beocia of the island of Eubea, in Greece.[6]

Sight of Conímbriga.

In the Spanish territory find numerous archaeologic rests of roman villas, as the one of Cambre (The Coruña), the Villa The Olmeda in Palencia, the one of Beacon-Pure in Valladolid, the one of Camarzana of Tera (Zamora), the Villa of Camesa-Rebolledo in Cantabria and the Villa of Tower Llauder in Mataró. The model of playground peristilado detects in some rests of villas like the ones of The Caves of Soria, Montijo, Rein, The Pumar, The Santiscal, Green River in Marbella or the domus number 1 of Ampurias. They have found rests of channels and sources in the Villa of the Pasture of The Cocosa (Badajoz), or of lakes in Villa Fortunatus, near of Fraga (Huesca), or in the Villa of Ujal in Benicató (Nules), The Soldán and Bruñel in Quesada (Jaén).[7]

In Conímbriga, at present in Portugal but pertaining in his day to the ancient Hispania, find some of the best examples of Hispanic villas, with a different planimetry to the prototype of roman garden —like the appreciated in Pompeii—, since instead of surrounding the garden a central lake, is the other way around: it is this the one who circunda the vegetal zone. In these villas the model of playground peristilado is more complex, with lateral series of small playgrounds with peristilos secondary.[8]

Apart from the houses and Roman villas, there existed numerous green zones in urban spaces, like gymnasiums, thermae and theatres, a peristyle situated in its back; a clear example is the porticus post scaenam of the Theatre of Mérida, that included a garden with sources, a channel around the perimeter, sculptures and a sundial.[9]

The gardening hispanorromana left a legacy assumed by the back cultures settled in the peninsula, especially regarding the use of inner playgrounds to contain gardens of small dimensions, the agglutination of the external landscape to the house, the employment of the hydraulic resources, or the aprovechamiento of species frutales in the garden, like the vineyard or the olive.[9]

Half age

Playground of the Arrayanes, Alhambra of Granada.

Islamic garden

The gardening had a big development in the Islamic culture, that valued to a large extent the aesthetic space provided by the garden, evocador of the earthly Paradise. The Islamic garden was heir of the Persian garden (chahar bagh). There are testimonies that situate it previously even to the Egyptian garden, and of that have arrived relatos like the one of Jenofonte of the park of Sardes built by Ciro, or of the Book of the kings of Ferdousí, that describes the park of 120 hectares built by Cosroes II in Firuzabad, divided in four separate zones by two perpendicular axes, that symbolise the four rivers of the Paradise (water, wine, milk and honey), element that would be re-created with assiduity by the Islamic garden.[10] The abásidas built big parks with gardens and pavilions of re-create in Baghdad and Samarra, around the year 750. This planimetry happened to the Muslim Spain after the conquest of almost all the peninsula initiated in 711 by the Omeyas.[11]

As described by the Koran, Paradise is something physical, tangible, no merely symbolic as in the Christianity. The Koran employs the term to the-djanna for Paradise, whose literal translation is «garden». Thus, it put it of the Islamic garden is to evoke the Paradise in the measure of the possible, although without arriving never to his heights of perfection, and like this turns into a source of artistic inspiration. They are numerous the references to the paradise in the literature hispanoárabe:

On the other hand, the difficult conditions of life of the Arab village, in a climate predominantly desértico, did that they valued to a large extent elements like the water and the vegetation, whose conjunction in the «oasis» produced the consideration of the garden like a vergel of appreciated assessment, like a sign of wealth and beauty at the same time. These factors comported to his time to the enclaustramiento of the garden, since when being a very scarce suited to preserve it of odd elements.[12]

Playground of the Naranjos, Mosque of Córdoba.

In Spain, the garden hispanoárabe saw influenced by the previous roman realisations and other stylistic stamps of European origin, with what quickly differentiated of the rest of Islamic gardens produced in the Near Orient or the north of Africa, the original Muslim territories. Like this, in the terrain of the gardening perceives the assimilation hispanoárabe of the model of roman playground, that however would be so characteristic of the Islamic garden Spanish, whose footprint perdura in numerous playgrounds ladscaped especially in Andalucia.[13]

Another distinctive stamp so much of the garden as of the urbanismo hispanoárabe is his closing, his hermetismo, given the character intimista and reserved of the Islamic culture. Like this, the urban enclosures are used to be walled off, and the houses inside them schedule to the interior, with simple façades, without ornaments, without ostentation. Instead, in his interior deploys all the possible magnificence, with gardens where the main leadership awards to the water, that is the axis vertebrador of any vegetal and ornamental planning.[14] A sign of the importance conceded to the water is his canalisation in resolve to open sky, on the contrary of the concealment of the pipes that is used to be usual in the western field; besides, those resolve were used to decorate with mosaics polícromos, to enhance the beauty of the water in his route.[15] As Tito Red, expert in gardening hispanoárabe, the water is the «paramount element of the design, if there is some common characteristic in the Arabo-Andalusian gardens is his orthogonal outline and the presence of the water marking the main axis of symmetry».[16]

See also

References

Bibliography

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