Historical Gardens

Last week, the ‘Persian Garden’ was added to the Unesco list of World Heritage sites. The commission identified nine gardens in several Iranian provinces that exemplify the Persian Garden, from its inception 2600 years ago to the current state.

That current state differs considerably. Some gardens only show remnants of what once was, the northern garden of Bagh-e Abas Abad for example, or the very minimalist remnants of Cyrus the Great’s garden at Pasargad. Others, such as Bagh-e Fin in Kashan in the Isfahan province, are in pristine shape.

Thusfar the Unesco website only gives two pictures of one garden. We can do better than that. Not all gardens are represented in HGimages (the Historical Gardens photo group on flickr) yet, and the ones that are there do not show many photos. But that is work in progress and I thought it would be nice to get a visual idea of what these gardes look like now. In the list below, the links refer to these photos. No link, no photos.

The nine listed gardens are:

• Bagh-e Abas Abad | HGmap
• Bagh-e Fin | HGmap
• Bagh-e Chehel Sotun | HGmap
• Bagh-e Akhbariyeh
• Bagh-e Shahzadeh
• Bagh-e Eram | HGmap
• Ancient garden of Pasargadae | HGmap
• Bagh-e Dolat Abad | HGmap
• Bagh-e Pahlavanpur

Finally I would like to point at an amazing feature of traditional Iranian architecture, which I encountered while looking for pictures of these gardens: the ‘windcatchers’, as at Dolat Abad. It shows how inventive people can get when living in harsh conditions that -on the surface- seem to make living there impossible. It is the same inventiveness that made gardening possible here for over two and a half century. And counting.

Mr. Kees de Ruiter, president of the new Dutch organisation responsible for the protection of the cultural heritage, RACM, held a plea to protect 10% of the Dutch cultural landscape as historical landscapes.

In an interview he claimed that regional differences are disappearing in an increasing pace, pointing at the same terracotta pots used everywhere and similarities between industrial estates throughout the country. At the moment no cultural landscapes have been protected formally.

And although I like the idea in general, I am slightly disturbed by the fact that the interview apparently did not state any requirements for this 10% -nor did it state which parameters mr. De Ruiter wants to use to select the greater group of so-called cultural landscapes. It did, however, state that we should be well considered about what we do with the other 90% percent of the cultural landscape, meaning the to-be-unprotected part of what can at best be descibed as an ill defined group of landscapes (within the even greater group of Dutch landscapes -which are all not natural, and as a consequence, he means the whole of The Netherlands?), which are changing in such a rapid pace, they must defy definition.

Sometimes no news is the best news.

Update (Feb 4, 2007): Unesco created this website recently, on which their criteria to ascertain whether a certain landscape qualifies as a ‘cultural landscape’ can be found, as well as an overview of the landcapes listed thusfar. Interesting stuff. Does not exactly help me to clarify what Mr. De Ruiter really wants, though.