The Austrian National Library has been converted into a panoply of earthly delights with this season’s Of Gardens and People exhibition. The show includes ground plans of gardens in the imperial capital and related crown lands of the Habsburg Monarchy, including the famous gardens at Tivoli in Rome, Versailles outside of Paris, and the Palazzo Reale in Milano. The focus is on the history of gardening up to the change it underwent in the 20th century.
“Il faut cultiver le jardin” is a leitmotif of the expansion of the baroque gardens in Vienna and neighboring provinces. If this quotation from Voltaire’s 1759 work Candide argues for the necessity of the garden in the cultivated life, a vedoute of Emperor Charles V with his rake in hand illustrates well the Habsburgs’ early dedication to gardens as sources of inspiration and beauty. None other than Béla Bartok put to music The Song of the Rake, Sz.107, No. 65, in his Mikrokosmos exercises which he wrote while in exile in New York. In English translation:
Could you, would you, let me share your rake so fine?
No sir, go sir, don’t you know this rake is mine?
I would trade you apples from my tree.
Never, my fine rake is just for me!
From Habsburg in Vienna to Jefferson at Monticello, this special exhibition focuses on the overriding power of the garden as a pendant in the life of civilized society. Gardening has much to do with pattern, color, floral choice, and preservation. The ecology of private and public gardens is as rooted as Adam and Eve’s in the Garden of Eden. What is astonishing is the direction and diversity which gardens have taken over half a millennium. In a chronology of gardening, the exhibition addresses renaissance gardens, the French baroque, English landscape gardens, gardens of the classic modern, green postwar models, ecological gardens, and post-modern gardens.
There is a garden for each time, so it appears. Vienna and environs captivate with the use of baroque patterns which can be seen in the ground plans for Schönbrunn Palace, Belvedere Palace, Schloss Hof, or Laxenburg, last of which is a favorite landscape garden where Empress Elisabeth would exercise her horse (and which also housed Mozart premieres during the reign of Joseph II). To some extents this flourishing of the baroque garden centered on the Viennese court. With the defeat of the Turkish armies in 1683, Prince Francois-Eugène de Savoie-Carignan, one of Austria’s leading military commanders, was given court tribute to build both the Belvedere and Schloss Hof palaces. Another magnificent garden is the Schwarzenberg Park, unfortunately closed to the public. The privy garden of Prince Eugène is replanted each year with different flowers, as is the splendid main garden with its cascading fountain and allegorical sculptures open to the public.
An interesting point is that private gardens were earlier reserved for clerics and nobility. The beautiful Burggarten in Vienna’s city center was not open to the public until 1919 after Emperor Charles’ abdication in Eckartsau in 1918.
If Of Gardens and People exhibits a huge wealth of ground plans, vignettes of gardens with their origin, usage, design, and attributes, it also draws on the fact that urbanization, as with the construction of the Ringstrasse 1862-65, brought a change to the urban landscape. Additions of green spaces were open not only to the nobility but to an rising industrial class that made use of these new public spaces. Crowds gathered at the Stadtpark to listen to Johann Strauss and his orchestra perform regularly on Sundays.
Vienna’s city’s government was vital to landscape architecture. Stadtpark was funded publicly during the construction of the Ringstrasse. Burgarten—with its herbarium, butterfly house, and greenhouse turned Palmenhaus Restaurant—was and has been a government undertaking since 1919.
Vienna did make some big changes in the second half of the new century. The exhibition highlights one of the biggest public garden offerings in the history of Vienna in 1964, when the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) held the WIG 64 garden show with 2.5 million people attending.
For the expanse of inclusion and attention to detail—gardening has always been specific and involved significant choice—the National Library’s Of Gardens and People is a storehouse of wealth about gardens. The exhibition runs through November 5th. After visiting, I would strongly suggest taking the time for an onsite visit to any number of incredible city gardens in Vienna and the surrounding areas.
