The earliest Polish landscape gardens in the light of source materials (descriptions, treatises and poems)

Marzanna Jagiełło, Wojciech Brzezowski

doi:10.5277/arc180304

Abstract

The article presents a history of development of informal gardens in Poland. The earliest gardens of this kind arose in the 3rd terce of the 18th century. This first phase of establishing freestyle gardens was noted by many journalists, travelers, diplomats, scientists who came to us at that time and who left behind priceless „travel descriptions”. Their judgment was sometimes painfully honest. Many owners of these gardens were accused of glistening and showing off, often ineptly and unpalatably imitating foreign patterns, and very rarely manifesting sincere involvement. The latter cannot be denied to Polish gardeners-dilettantes: Izabela Czartoryska, Aleksandra Lubomirska, Aleksander Ogińska, Helena Radziwiłowa and Stanisław Kostka Potocki. It is thanks to them, inspired by many European journeys and even more numerous publications devoted to garden art, that in the last years of the Republic’s existence and the first few of its downfall, a mosaic of garden forms appeared, sometimes difficult to classify, later named “English”, though they were closer to many French landscape gardens at that time.