Historic Gardens and Covid-19. Back to a new reality

After the lock down period, our gardens open their doors and welcome us. Now that we can visit them, we do it in a different way. Yes, we have to keep the health safety measures, but the main difference is that we appreciate them even more than before.

We want to welcome all garden lovers to our historic gardens by sharing this beautiful, inspiring and encouraging article written by Mr. Jose Tito Rojo, President of our Scientific Committee and, as he defines himself, “a person of the garden”:

When we woke up, the garden was still there

By José Tito Rojo

Let us recognize that the incubus of the pandemic has brought to our memory terrible images, collective fears nested in the subconscious, memories of the past read in old chronicles that have been reborn in newspapers and televisions. The distant references of the medieval plagues, the debated Spanish flu, the attacks of bacteria and viruses that in recent times have periodically shown their gloomy little leg under the door, as in the nightmares of children’s stories.

For me, a person of the garden, the reference that has come to my mind permanently has been a literary classic, the Decameron by Giovanni Bocaccio. After the terrible description of the mortality in the cities and the cruel enumeration of the attitudes that one or the other adopted towards terror, from the most pious to the most immoral, he presented the perverse contradiction that justified the book: the disease taking over in the cities while the group of young people escaped to the mountain nature and the pleasure of the garden where, indolently, they spent their time telling each other funny stories.

The garden as a peace oasis

The garden appeared to readers of the Decameron as the peace oasis against chaos, the safe life against the certainty of death. The retreat took place there, in “un palagio con bello e gran cortile nel mezzo, e con logge e con sale e con camera, tutte, ciascuna verso di se bellissima, e di liete dipinture ragguardevole et ornata, con pratelli dattorno e con giardini maravigliosi” [a house with a beautiful and large patio in the middle, and with galleries and rooms and bedrooms, all beautiful and adorned with charming paintings worthy of being looked at, adorned with pradillos around and with wonderful gardens].

Then, when Bocaccio wrote, there was not what we call today public gardens. The function that parks fulfill today was housed at that time in the few communal meadows of the urban limits or in the agricultural crops that, at times, were occupied by the inhabitants of the cities for meetings or celebrations.

This rare threat of the Covid-19 has confronted us with an unexpected reality, the public garden could not have been that kind refuge from the danger that the gardens fulfilled in our imagination of the past. The managers of the pandemic have been forced to cancel admission, to close the parks, because the public garden could be a place of contact, of multiplication of infections. In a strange spring, life in the historical gardens has behaved with ignored splendor: unseen blooms, shadows and scents not visited, wildlife free from the unusual solitude of the sites. The managers of the gardens have had to develop strategies for which they were not prepared, keeping wonders that could not be seen in optimal conditions, scheduling jobs for gardeners who had to observe different precautions than the usual ones, making unforeseen expenses without any economic income compensation.

The desire for the pleasure of nature

Over time, after the moment of greatest danger, when societies have developed protective measures and mobility has been released, a new phenomenon has appeared: the desire of populations for the pleasure of nature, especially for the close nature of public parks and gardens. The gradual recovery of mobility has awakened walkers who never walked before, crowds of nature lovers who previously barely remembered that it existed. And the garden has returned to fulfill its kind function.

The gardens have been reopened, giving the citizens their beneficial meaning. Like it happened to the enigmatic character of Augusto Monterroso, in the shortest story in the history of literature, “When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there”, people are waking up from the nightmare and discovering that the gardens are still in the same place where they were. Offering up. Open again for solace and enjoyment of peace and beauty. Although we still, for a while, have to visit them with an uncomfortable mask.

I have discovered with pleasure that this fabric does not prevent the smell of flowers from reaching us.

José Tito Rojo

President of the Scientific Committee of the European Route of Histoirc Gardens (ERHG) Relevant landscaper and researcher specialized in the history of the garden and the landscape.