Excavating a modern garden
July 27th, 2008 by HvdE
Jardines de Pedro Luis Alonso, a garden I have only seen once -looking down from halfway up the hill towards the Gibralfaro Castle in Málaga (Spain)- prompted some of the general questions garden historians face when writing about a garden. Especially when the garden is not very familiar to them, or when information is not readilly accessible (in this case: because Spanish is a language I do not have a thorough command of).
The splendid photo above, taken in the 1940s, shows the central part of the garden in a pristine state of preparation. It almost looks like a textbook example of garden archaeology, with the different levels to which the excavators dared to venture in their efforts to get a grasp on the unknown garden they have found and whose layout they are trying to record. Photo by Xavieris.
And as historical gardens go, this should be an easy one: it is a 20th century design, laid out right next to the city hall of Málaga, so there should be no lack of trustworthy records. There probably aren’t, but I’ll leave those to the local enthusiasts to dig through. General sources I have access to show that the origins of such a ‘new’ garden -of minor importance, maybe, but still- can become quite unclear within a few decades.
Gardenvisit.com, for instance, says that the garden was designed in 1945 by the architect Guerrero Strachan, and that the design is an evocation of the dictatorial Franco years.
But Fernando Guerrero Strachan died in 1930, 15 years before he allegedly designed the garden -and a few years before Franco came to power. It is ofcourse possible that he made the design before his death, but that the actual execution of the garden -no pun intended- was delayed by the Spanish Civil War. Then this photo would mark the finishing of this garden in 1945, from a design made 15 years earlier. Continue Reading »
