Transsylvania Nostra Journal

Although a garden should not be compared to the landscape in every case, its significance from the viewpoint of landscape is much greater than it first may appear: according to a philosophical approach, the garden, as the earthly copy of the Garden of Eden, is “one of humanity’s best inventions and the means of making oneself feel at home in this world.” Therefore, this explains the constant striving to conquer untamed nature, the foreign territories lying beyond the bounds of the garden cosmos. If “landscape design is none other than the extension of garden design, or indeed, urban planning”, then the significance of landscaping initiated with gardening methods becomes even more obvious. The landscape garden, despite its strongly composed nature, drew inspiration from the surrounding landscape elements that themselves owed their appearance to the decades and centuries of traditional use of landscape. The manorial centre, where the only significant garden in the area could take shape, has always possessed symbolic significance: it represented the cultural, economic and social centre of the region. The increase in the number of similar cultural focal points led to the increasingly vigorous shaping of the environment. In his work, Tour through Great Britain, Daniel DEFOE relates the experiences of his journey around England between 1724 and 1726, emphasizing that he incessantly encountered during his travels county estates of varying sizes, which he saw as the propagators of culture. At the same time, the manorial centres were the popularisers of intellectual currents and the achievements of modern gardening in various areas of the country. Almost 100 years later these very same thoughts also permeate Ferenc KAZINCZY’s Transylvanian Letters (1816-1819). The fact that the Transylvanian Baroque castle and garden, though in direct contact with Vienna, precisely because of this unfortunate political dependence rejected everything that was Viennese Baroque and displayed instead elements of the French Baroque, furnished with local, subdued, “rural” (in the positive sense of the word) stylistic marks, can be ascribed to the intertwining of national identity and landscape culture. The study presents the conscious modelling of the landscape starting from the 17th century, introducing three examples of properties belonging to families that had important cultural and economic roles in the history of Transylvania.

Keywords: garden history, landscape history, land use, cultural heritage, manor house gardens