Friday, March 29

the garden weeks

Since the biblical expulsion from paradise, humanity has tried to return to the dream of bucolic life by rebuilding the lost ideal through the concept of the garden. Now fully involved in the battle against climate change, the garden as a way of defending nature also becomes an urgent mission.

The forms that the garden has been adopting throughout history tell the evolution of society and its changing idea of ​​paradise. The architectural forms that delimit it, the species that make it up, the water pipes that feed it are some of the elements that make up the different gardens. We now have the opportunity to live in a garden every week thanks to the invitation to visit them that the program makes us Gardens with History (broadcast on 2, Saturday afternoon at 6 pm). Only in the absence of the smell of plants, this way of entering the gardens is as spectacular as it is unique. We fly over them, we enter unknown corners, we change speed in contemplation or in the walk, in a unique and pleasant audiovisual tour.

Visually exuberant, like nature teaches us, the key to this program lies in its fluid narrative, which unfolds the history of the construction, the plants and spices that make it up, and the biography of the dreamers who made their paradise come true. Both the presenter, an architect by profession, and the experts who comment on the vicissitudes of the place each week offer us little stories that make up the controlled geography of each garden and each gardener.

Thanks to ‘Gardens with history’ we can verify that the greatness of the herculean Monastery of El Escorial does not reside only in the megalithic construction of Villanueva but in the gardens that surround it, adorn it and bear fruit for the maintenance of health and hygiene the largest center of power in the world at that time. They have also taken us on a tour of the secrets of the water of the Alhambra or the acclimatization garden of La Orotava where the plant treasure brought from America found its transition zone to be able to germinate on European soil.

Along with the large gardens, we can also visit small gems born from a personal commitment, such as the gardens of Alfabia of Arab origin or Son Marroig. in Mallorca, thanks to the efforts of the Archduke Luis Salvador. On the outskirts of Malaga, it was the Loring family who created La Concepción, an orchard made up of exotic trees and plants brought by sea from the most remote destinations. Industrial failures such as those of the businessman Muntadas, who intended to take advantage of the currents and waterfalls of the Piedra river in Aragón to supply energy to his looms, ended up being converted into a hotel industry and “natural entertainment” that made the Piedra de los Monasterio de los ancient Cistercian monks a must for lovers of the most amazing nature.

Plant and landscape heritage

With high quality photography by Ignacio Giménez-Rico, perfectly set music by Jansi Aúz, presentation by Arturo Franco and direction by Sonia Tercero Ramiro, these gardens have already been endorsed in their first season by the Television Academy with its Iris Award , for the quality of the production and the perfect adaptation of the scripts to this story that is so necessary to tell and preserve. These Gardens are also a visiting card for Spain in the world, by combining the historical architectural heritage with the preservation of the plant heritage, careful and orderly that unfolds before our eyes. As in the theatrical “getting lost in the garden” of the actors before a forgetful text, this program invites you to wander among flowers, plants, trees and tasty stories of creators and curators to comfort and encourage the viewer who wants a more natural and pleasant life. .

Each garden feeds the passion for botany and the defense of nature that must be pampered by each one of us because ours is ours. The architect author of Torresblancas, Sáenz de Oiza, paraphrased Saint Augustine, liked to say that “the city is the dream of man on earth”. If that were the dream, the garden is the dream paradise come true, where we deposit all our efforts to finally find the ecological dream of salvation on earth.

Every week a garden, its history, the plants that inhabit it, its architectural framework, recounting the dreams come true that its creators are the protagonists of and that are learnedly supported by experts in botany, gardening, landscaping and other disciplines that will make us understand logic and beauty. of these natural spaces recreated by man and transformed with his own work. Let’s make good the title of that book of varied clippings and loose stories by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio: The Garden Weeks, and let’s look at these recreated paradises to find inspiration and a solution to the environmental problems we face on the planet.



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