Gabrielle van Zuylen


Baroness Gabriëlle Andrée van Zuylen van Nyevely van de Haar was a French landscape architect, garden designer, garden writer and a member of the International Best Dressed Hall of Fame List since 1978. "Baroness Gabrielle van Zuylen personifies the charm and elegance", according to the French magazine L'ŒIL.

Biography

Gabrielle van Zuylen was born in southern France, daughter of Andrés Iglesias y Velayos, the Spanish consul in Perpignan, and his wife Mildred Taliaferro. She grew up in the United States and studied at Radcliffe College. She bears the title baroness van Zuylen as wife of the Dutch baron since they got married in 1956 in Boston. Although they divorced in 1987, Gabrielle retained the name Van Zuylen.
The Van Zuylen couple bought the property Haras de Varaville in Normandy in 1964. The property consisted of a 17th-century stable and ruins of castles that burned down in 1937. They asked the American architect Peter Harden to build a new home in a modern style. The garden was created and designed by the British landscape architect Russell Page. Gabrielle van Zuylen later wrote the book The Gardens of Russell Page, which is about his influence in landscape architecture. The Garden Writers Association of America named this work ‘best book on gardens’.
She became a specialist on the construction of gardens and published several works about the subject, especially about historic gardens. Her books appeared mostly in French and English and some were also published or translated in other languages. She was a member of the, Les Amateurs de Jardins and was a Chevalier of the Order of Agricultural Merit. She was also a gardener.

Interview

An interview between Van Zuylen and Éditions Gallimard took place on the occasion of the publication of Tous les jardins du monde, a heavily illustrated pocket book belonging to the collection "Découvertes Gallimard", which gives a concise history of the gardens, from antiquity to the modern day.
Van Zuylen described that pleasure is the primary purpose of a garden, the gardens have always been called "pleasure gardens". There are also three main functions of the garden: the sacred – "sacred enclosure", the place blessed by gods; the power – the great gardens of Cyrus in Persia were wonderful paradises, but also masterful demonstrations of power; the domestic – the small, useful and popular city gardens.
The Romans were the first to have the aesthetic concern of nature, for them, the garden was the counterpart of architecture. In the Middle Ages, the garden also played a very important role, but in another sense: it was walled, protected from the outside. It was the secret garden, the garden of delights, allegory and theatre of love. The large classical gardens of the monarchy at Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles, the gardens à la française. In the eighteenth-century England, on the contrary, with the landscape gardens developed by the large landowners which are far from the court. The garden is truly a mirror, the counterpart of the social, political and artistic history of a civilisation.

Tous les jardins du monde, an elegantly and beautifully illustrated pocket-sized book that treats about the history of Western gardens in a professional way, from antiquity, medieval Europe, Renaissance Italy, Classical France, 18th-century England up to the modern day. The book provides numerous historical documents in its second part—the "Documents" section—which contains a compilation of excerpts divided into seven parts: 1, The origins of European gardens; 2, Gardens of the Middle Ages; 3, The Renaissance; 4, The royal gardens of France; 5, Art or nature?; 6, The diversity of 20th-century gardening; 7, Gardens of the New World. At the end of the book are glossary, list of the great European gardens, excerpts from the Florence Charter, further reading, list of illustrations and index. It has been translated into American and British English, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Turkish, South Korean, simplified and traditional Chinese.
Van Zuylen explains in the book the origin and meaning of a number of historical terms:
and a telling record of late medieval gardening practices.' – Excerpted from the caption for the painting which found on as a double-page spread illustration in this book.
It is natural using French sources in an English garden book, especially with regard to the medieval gardens, such as the frescoes from the Palais des Papes in Avignon and illustrations from the Bibliothèque nationale de France. But the author didn't forget to include some German sources, with Paradiesgärtlein being one of them.
It goes without saying that the glory of classical French garden culture and the dynasties of famous garden designers are discussed: Claude and Jacques Mollet, André Le Nôtre.
A less well known figure, Peter Joseph Lenné, a 19th-century Prussian gardener and landscape architect who worked in Potsdam and Berlin.
Following the Viennese Prater as the first public park, Napoleon III commissioned around 1850 the prefect of the Seine department, baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann to direct the renovation of Paris. Haussmann worked with the engineer Adolphe Alphand and the gardener Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps, they changed the closed hunting forest Bois de Boulogne into a recreation park for the Parisian public. At the same time, Frederick Law Olmsted designed the Central Park in New York City.
Then in the modern times, the beloved gardens of Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville-West and Major Lawrence Johnston. The current canon of the good garden: a formal structure in combination with an informal planting, especially the perennials.
Van Zuylen closes her book with a reflection:

Publications