About the author:
Elena O. Grafova (Moscow, Russia), graduate student, Dmitry Likhachev Russian Research Institute of Cultural and Natural Heritage.
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5890-864X.
E-mail:
Abstract:
The garden is the most important element of the “estate topos”. The idea of Ligurian gardens, created by philanthropists Daniel and Thomas Hanbury and embodied by landscape designer, botanist and garden architect Louis Winter, is to collect plants from around the world and give them a new “read” in the gardens of a “beautiful era”.This idea of travel, of attention to plants, flowers whose seeds can be collected in different parts of the world (in Japan, China, Australia, on the African continent, in the Americas), carries the idea of beauty, variety in simple and complex. The image of a flower as a unique creature, whose life is full of great meaning – moving towards sunlight, overcoming the obstacles that stand in its way — is one of the most important symbols of the modern era. The beauty of a flower that reaches out to the light is a key idea in the art edition “The Mind of Flowers” (1907) by Maurice Meterlink.