Town Garden Research Articles

Greening of Public Spaces in Cherepovets during Urbanization, 1870 - 1930s: Contradictions of Sustainable Development

From the second half of the XIX century, public gardens and boulevards have become an integral part of provincial Russian towns. They played an aesthetic and sanitary-hygienic role in urban space, being, in fact, green oases in a dusty and noisy town. However, in the XX century, the functional purpose of town gardens has changed: the recreational component is being replaced by the cultural and entertainment one, which became dominant in the Soviet period. This article considers the process of urban space greening in the provincial town of Cherepovets as an example of this process and transforming the functions of the town garden. It also presents the analysis of everyday practices of using urban flora by the population of Cherepovets. The methodological basis of the work is urban environmental history. The research is based on archival and office materials, official statistics, and periodicals. Soviet power kept the tradition of new blocks greening, that formed in the pre-revolutionary period. At the same time, the entertainment and leisure functions of the recreation park supplanted the recreational function, and everyday practices of the town residents showed a dismissive and utilitarian attitude towards the town green spaces. It was due to the peculiarities of urbanization in the city. In the conditions of the constantly expanding town space and the influx of rural population, green spaces could not prevent the degradation of the natural environment, which led to the destabilization of the ecological situation in Cherepovets and prevented the sustainable development of the city.
 Keywords: urban environmental history, urban greening, a city garden, everyday practice

Traditional agricultural gardens conserve wild plants and functional richness in arid South Sinai

Maintaining agricultural diversity is important for the conservation of rare species and for preserving underlying ecosystem processes on which smallholder farmers rely. The positive effects of crop diversity are well documented in tropical systems, but the conservation potential of arid agricultural systems is less clear. This study assesses the impact of three arid agroforestry systems on plant diversity and functional richness in South Sinai, Egypt: (1) mountain orchard gardens, (2) modern town gardens and (3) low desert date-palm gardens. We surveyed plants (cultivated and wild) within gardens and control plots of natural habitat and allocated each plant eight biological traits that are recognised as being linked with major ecosystem processes. Species diversity was quantified using three measures (Hill's numbers) and total species diversity was significantly higher within gardens than in the surrounding habitat at all three levels of diversity and across the three agroforestry systems. Species similarity was high between gardens and the surrounding habitat, and there was a strong overlap in the functional traits of wild plants and cultivated non-tree species. Despite the clear presence of trees within the gardens, the community weighted trait means (CWMs) showed that chamaephyte perennials were the dominant life-forms in both the gardens and the natural habitat. Functional richness differed between the three agroforestry systems, but was significantly higher within the gardens. Functional richness has been linked to increased productivity and CWMs showed that plants within the gardens were considerably taller than outside, suggesting higher biomass accumulation. These findings suggest that Bedouin agricultural practices are not having a negative effect on the flora of the region and that the continuation of these indigenous farming practices can actively benefit rare wild plants in the region. On a wider scale, this study supports the view that smallholder farms and homegardens can be valuable tools in conservation, preserving local species and maintaining ecosystem functioning.

Aspek Jiwa Tempat Sebagai Landasan Revitalisasi Kawasan (Studi Kasus: Perencanaan Perbelanjaan Kaki Lima di Kawasan Taman Sari Salatiga)

Revitalisation is effort that reanimates an area. In case of Taman Sari area in Salatiga, revitalises done through change of function according to street vendor shopping centre with basic planning the spirit of place. Spirit of place (Genius Loci) is soul from place, representing Roman concept in effort to find the history root, cultural, and also character of place. To dig the spirit of place from non physical face (activity) can be done by using superimposes map, earn through history stemming explorations from literature and informant. Data result by verbal explorations must be accompanied with authentic data in map and photo form. The problem is realizing the street vendor shopping centre planning area with basis spirit of place to returning the area that be able to generator of commerce and recreation area. There are 3 problems lifted. First problem is appropriate revitalises area as same as the early function as town garden (open public space) by considering the spirit of place. The target is to increase area performance that representing commerce node in town. Second, revitalises in Taman Sari use street vendor shopping centre concept equipped by the supporter facility and area element that under colour by spirit of place. Third, place for street vendor and public space with basic spirit of place, processing the street furniture, skyline, the situation, colour element, and the green belt. Keyword: Revitalisation, Spirit of Place, Street Vendor Shopping Centre

PROBLEMS OF URBAN GREEN AREAS AND THEIR SOCIAL FUNCTION

The town is a complicated system the main components of which are the community and its environment. Therefore, town planning and formation of green area should be performed taking into consideration the community’s activities and needs. Favorable conditions must be created for people to live, work, study and rest. Solving these social tasks a great role falls on urban public areas and green areas. The town’s community, municipality and investors have to take an active part in solving this task. Urban green areas have to be formed systematically. In this system we can distinguish three groups of green areas which are very important for the community: a natural frame, green areas for territories of a general use (parks, town gardens, squares, etc), and green areas integrated into territories of various purposes (dwelling, industrial and commercial activities, learning, etc). They have to be planned and formed taking into account the activities and needs of the local community. The author’s analysis shows that there are a lot of gaps in this sphere. In order to eliminate its shortcomings, it is necessary to pass a law regulating urban green areas as soon as possible, and on this basis to prepare rules and normative standards for green area planning, paying a great attention to the social function of green areas.

Review: The London Town Garden 1700-1840 by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

Review: The London Town Garden 1700-1840 by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

William Lyon Mackenzie King, planning advocate

The article discusses the direct influence of Canada's longest-serving Prime Minister on town planning and the development of the national capital in the first half of the twentieth century. King flirted with the settlement house movement, interning Jane Addams at Hull House while a graduate student. He later included town planning and garden cities as a component of a broader programme of social reform. The article considers King's connection to four broad traditions in early North American planning: Social Planning, the Parks Movement, the City Scientific and the City Beautiful. King's greatest impact was as the political champion for the planning and development of Canada's national capital, much of which was completed in the two decades after his death.

Daily temperature extremes for Britain

The utmost care has been taken in checking available records and conditions of thermometer exposure in order to provide tables of Britain’s extreme temperatures for every date of the year. The stages at which comparable standards of exposure (including site exposure) were implemented, following the invention of the Stevenson screen in 1866, have been discussed by Webb and Meaden (1993) and Parker (1994). Table 1 lists Britain’s highest recorded temperatures for every date of the year. This covers the period beginning with the introduction of standardised thermometer exposure in the mid-1870s and ending on the last day of 1999. It fully updates the list published by Meaden and Webb (1984), and revised by Webb and Meaden (1997). The distinction between ‘standard’ and ‘representative’ stations must be noted. Camden Square, although not quite meeting the criteria for an ideal standard station, was probably very representative of inner London. Likewise, the early twentieth-century stations at Epsom and Beddington were, then, quite representative of town gardens in the home counties. Table 2 includes a fully updated version of the table of daily extreme minimum temperatures for the eight months October to May inclusive, first published by Webb (1 985). The extremes listed are limited to sites below 500 m, excluding ‘high-level’ weather stations which are not at permanently inhabited heights (e.g. Ben Nevis Observatory!). The highest village in England is Flash (Staffordshire) at 463m. Reported minima for June to September include many readings from such upland sites, making the compilation of a daily list of minima for this period of the year impracticable. Moreover, comprehensive summer ‘lows’ would arguably be of only technical interest, as it is cold summer days which stick in the public awareness (and which attract media attention). However, recorded lows for each 10-day period in these four warmest months have been included in Table 2, in order to answer questions such as “what is the lowest temperature on record in late June”, or “in early September”. Table 2 covers the 125 years ending in 1999. Local factors (adiabatic warming, relative altitude, soil type, etc.) can raise summer maxima by up to about 2 degC above general levels. The fohn effect in winter (Lockwood 1962) can account for larger anomalies downwind of mountain ranges. Otherwise highs more than 2 degC above adjacent stations (at comparable altitudes) must be treated with scepticism. Potential pitfalls in the study of temperature (and other) extremes are discussed by Dukes and Eden (1 997). The larger local variations in extreme minimum temperatures make it less appropriate to reject the authenticity of such readings on the basis of support from other stations alone, especially as their occurrence has often been in areas with a low density of climatological stations. Over the past 20 years, remote sensing of surface temperatures has been effectively used to identify very localised extreme minima, e.g. in 198 1-82 (Roach and Brownscombe 1984). This has highlighted the fact that we probably do not know the absolute range of British temperatures, because it is unlikely that orthodox thermometer screens have always been sited at the coldest spots (McClatchey et al. 1987)! From earlier in the period under discussion, there remain some sites for which full details are elusive, e.g. the site at Aviemore (certainly a cold location) from which several low minima were quoted for 1895 (Bayard and Marriott 1895). As discussed in Webb and Meaden

The Garden Plan for 13 Upper Gower Street, London: A Conjectural Review of the Planting, Upkeep and Long-Term Maintenance of a Late Eighteenth-Century Town Garden

The Garden Plan for 13 Upper Gower Street, London: A Conjectural Review of the Planting, Upkeep and Long-Term Maintenance of a Late Eighteenth-Century Town Garden

An Air of Detachment: Town Gardens in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

An Air of Detachment: Town Gardens in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Organic micropollutant and trace element pollution of Irish soils

Measured concentrations of organochlorine insecticide residues, PCBs and trace elements, Cd, Cr, Cu, Hg, Ni, Pb and Zn in Irish soils devoted to agriculture, in soils from an urban area, and in soils from an area with modern industrial development were generally indicative of low pollutant inputs. One instance of severe geochemical pollution from Cd was detected. DDT residues and Pb, in particular, Hg and Zn were elevated in town garden soils.

Desperately Seeking Darcy in Dijon

AbstractHenry Darcy (born 1803, died 1858) is known to soil physicists as the founding father of the science of fluid flow in soils. This illustrated account of a short visit to Dijon, his native town, reveals little‐known aspects of Darcy's character, life, and work. The central square and town gardens are named after Darcy, as are numerous commercial and public undertakings: a cinema, bus stop, a garage, a multistory car park, a pharmacy, and a shopping arcade. Inquiry revealed that Henry Darcy himself has been forgotten by the citizens of Dijon, and that his name persists only as a ubiquitous geographical label. It was not always thus. Darcy, with great vision and skill, designed and built a pure water supply system for Dijon, in place of previous squalor and filth. Dijon became a model for the rest of Europe. Darcy selflessly waived fees due to him from the town, corresponding to about $1.5 million today. Medals were struck recognizing his skill and selflessness; and a monument celebrates his great work. Dijon gave him a public funeral, the whole population lining the streets, and the council renamed the central square in his honor. His simple tomb is in good condition in Dijon cemetery. His letters to Henri‐Emile Bazin reveal him as intelligent, witty, and sceptical, and quite devoid of pretension.

Survey of keratinophilic fungi inhabiting Passer domesticus in two districts of Orissa, India

The distribution patterns of keratinophilic fungi isolated from Passer domesticus of a coastal (Puri) and an intercoastal (Dhenkanal) district were compared with respect to three parameters, season, age and sex. Irrespective of the parameters, Chrysosporium tropicum and Rollandina hyalinospora showed the highest frequency of occurrence. Their occurrence in the birds was not determined by any ecological or environmental condition in nature. Thus these fungi exhibited their ecological maturity or firm establishment in nature. The maximum fungal distribution occurred during the monsoon season and was minimal in the summer. Juvenile birds were active carriers of the fungi and the male birds harboured the maximum number of fungi. Thus male juvenile birds carried the maximum number of keratinophilic fungi during the monsoon season. The free-living P. domesticus enhances the degree of dispersal of keratinophilic fungi, it being in frequent contact with human artifacts, breeding in settlements and town gardens ‘Eusynanthropic habit’. The fungi so dispersed are called ‘mesoornithochorus’ as their occurrence in birds is determined to a certain degree by avian habits.

A Chesapeake craftsman's eighteenth-century gardens

Abstract American historians are familiar with the grand gardens of Chesapeake gentry such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson but know few details about the smaller gardens of artisans and craftsmen whose numbers grew in colonial towns during the second half of the eighteenth century. Marylander William Faris (1728–1804) was a craftsman and innkeeper who laid out his Annapolis garden in the 1760s. This clockmaker and silversmith kept an intimate 704 page diary (1712–1804) of day-to-day happenings plus his gardening efforts during the last thirteen years of his life. This unique journal offers a rare opportunity to reconstruct the town garden of an early American artisan. When Faris settled in Annapolis at mid-century, the capital was at the height of its political, economic, and social dominance in Maryland.1

Proposal for a Georgian Town Garden in Gower Street: The Francis Douce Garden

Proposal for a Georgian Town Garden in Gower Street: The Francis Douce Garden

Williamsburg: The Role of the Garden in "Making a Town"

Williamsburg: The Role of the Garden in "Making a Town" PETER E. MARTIN Royal commands, the best efforts of Governor William Berkeley and other governors, and pleas by merchants and the church that sizable towns be created and developed in seventeenth-century Virginia did little good. When Williamsburg was chartered at Middle Plantation as the new colonial capital in 1699, there were no true cities, either mercantile or so­ cial, in the colony. Williamsburg was supposed to be the beginning of a solution to that alarming problem. But whether it could become the thriv­ ing commercial and urban center for which Hugh Jones hoped in his Pres­ ent State of Virginia (1724)1 or which a College of William and Mary stu­ dent in 1699 apparently had in mind when he declared to the House of Burgesses, a voice crying in the wilderness, that "such a Town . . . may equal if not outdo Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and An­ napolis" was uncertain. History, of course, has replied negatively. Wil­ liamsburg never wrested from the plantation system the control of trade; it never became an economic center for the colony. It did contain some trade, naturally, but its principal importance and fame was as a cultural and artistic center. It became a venue for civilized and elitist living to those affluent plantation "patriarchs" like William Byrd of Westover who helped found and plan the town, as well as to the relatively affluent law­ yers, doctors, and politicians who liked the idea of preserving its charac­ ter as a "village," as the late Richard Beale Davis liked to call it.2 Gardens and gardening in eighteenth-century Williamsburg, both or­ namental and practical, helped determine the village character of the town, even its genteel aspects. Gardens enabled a good number of the 187 188 / MARTIN town's residents to assume a pose of an elegant living that they thought they badly needed in the Tidewater wilderness — even as late as the last quarter of the century when the Revolution permanently disrupted that pose and the town lost its claim to fame as Thomas Jefferson engineered the capital's removal to Richmond in 1781. While the garden had become an archetype in seventeenth-century Virginia, cited frequently as a meta­ phor recalling the idea of primitive simplicity and reinforcing the evoca­ tive image of Virginia as a fresh new paradise, in the following century it increasingly came to be a palpable sign of civilization and urbanity. There is ample evidence that the garden was thus used in Williamsburg by resi­ dents in town or at nearby plantations. These people wished to see gar­ dens and feel like gardeners because that carried with it a feeling of having tamed the wilderness.3 This also made them feel closer to England and rather like the urbane, perhaps semi-"retired" gardeners of London town houses or even in villages like Twickenham, Fulham, Richmond, and Chiswick. Byrd, who although not dwelling in Williamsburg would have known the town's gardens better than most,4 was compelled into rede­ signing his garden at Westover in the late 1720s because he could not bear being without a version of a naturalized garden in the then-emerging English style. He had to face up to the reality that his hopes of living in England as a country squire had almost totally faded; his garden was one of his compensations. In 1729 he wrote with no small measure of smug­ ness to Major General Robert Armiger (at one time aide-de-camp to George II) with the news that "a library, a garden, a grove, and a purling stream are the innocent scenes that divert our leizure."5 But the gardens turned out to be an impediment to the growth of Wil­ liamsburg. Once they had done their part in consolidating the villagelike elegance of the new capital, powerful and affluent residents and people who visited regularly on business were increasingly reluctant to have it become more commercial and urban. According to them, the town had nearly attained by the mid-1720s, when Jones published his Present State of Virginia, what James Thomson in Spring described as "an elegant Suffi­ ciency...

The gardens of the London Livery Companies

Abstract Garden history has been dominated to a notable extent by the larger garden and, where England is concerned, particularly by the ‘landscape’ garden. There is also an absence of works on the city or town garden. Urban historians seldom look beyond the advantages of gardens and open spaces in city life and the means that have been employed in acquiring them, while students of garden history have equally rarely given significant attention to city gardens other than parks and public squares. There appears to be a genuine need for more concentrated attention to be directed to the smaller city or town garden and it is hoped that the present article will contribute towards a subject which will be explored in more detail in my forthcoming book, The Garden in the City.

Flower and Fruit Decoration; with some Remarks on the Treatment of Town Gardens, Terraces, &c., and with many Illustrations of Colour and Contrast, applicable to both Subjects

Flower and Fruit Decoration; with some Remarks on the Treatment of Town Gardens, Terraces, &c., and with many Illustrations of Colour and Contrast, applicable to both Subjects

The town garden: a manual for the management of city and suburban gardens

The town garden: a manual for the management of city and suburban gardens