PARK HISTORY

At the dawn of European history, on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, land was imparked for four non-agricultural uses. The Egyptians madedomestic gardens andtemple gardens. The Assyrians also madehunting parks. The Greeks addedpublic gardens, as meeting and market places protected within city walls. The Romans continued to make public meeting places, but the other three types of park became fused in the imperial villa and its progeny. Roman palace gardens, such as those made by Hadrian and Diocletian, merged the historic objectives of park-making. Parks were made for domestic pleasure, for exercise, for hunting, for the fine arts and for celebration of the emperor's godlike status. As such, they became models for Renaissance villas, in Italy and then throughout Europe, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. North European park and garden designers paid their respects to this ancestry when they included Greek and Roman statuary in their designs (Figure 4). So do all those gardeners who place concrete casts of Diana, Flora and Aphrodite amongst the roses of their suburban 'villas'.

Fragments of classical park prototypes can be found in modern parks, but they are decayed and confused, like the statuary. Most urban parkspace is non-domestic garden, non-temple garden, non-hunting park. Those broad acres of green that look so fine on planner's plans and tourist brochures offer remarkably scant value to the public. They provide little to see and very little to do. A few years ago, at lunchtime on a hot Sunday, I visited Sheffield Botanical Gardens, a well-known public park in one of England's older industrial cities. There were about 30 people lazing on the grass or giving their dogs an opportunity to relieve themselves. I then drove 15 km over the hills to Chatsworth, a famous old landscape park, still owned by the Duke of Devon­shire. There, ten times as many people were queuing to pay money and enter the grounds. Why can't modern cities provide the outdoor space that people want? Partly, it is because too many are owned by municipalities, theoretically devoted to the 'greatest happiness of the greatest number', but in practice over-willing to entrust parkspace to operatives whose training is in the use of machinery and chemicals for ornamental horticulture.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 765