The president’s choice is the wrong one
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I have been longing for a president to come along and understand that the garden at San Anton Palace is an integral part of the palace itself, and that at least a modicum of the time, effort and money spent on restoring the interior to splendour should be spent on doing the same with the garden.
On the rare occasions I go there, I am floored by despair at its bleakness, and over the years it has become worse rather than better. At least in years gone by an effort used to be made at planting different shrubs and flowering varieties, the ponds were full of ducks, swans and fish, and the terraced stone stands were packed with clay pots full of Mediterranean plants. The greenhouses, decrepit as they were, were full of cacti and succulents, and the old animal and bird cages were a curiosity with their baboons and parakeets. It had atmosphere. Now there is hardly any.
Any attempt at creating botanical variety and interest is long gone. The place now looks like an extended roundabout, with exactly the same varieties used on roundabouts being used for the palace gardens, and all the interesting varieties, except for the trees which have been there for centuries or decades, long gone.
The place feels dead.
Now President Coleiro Preca’s idea, as reported today in the news, is to turn the space into a “children’s Hyde Park”. I was floored with horror. It is quite obvious that the president thinks of it as any old garden and fails to see it as part of the integral whole of the palace. San Anton is architecturally landscaped as a classic French/Italian baroque garden. It is like the privately owned Palazzo Parisio. When it served as the Governor’s Palace under the British, its architectural symmetry was retained but the symmetry of planting was replaced by the English style which favours a look that appears random and is asymmetrical but is actually carefully planned.
San Anton Palace gardens should not be turned into “a children’s Hyde Park”. They should be restored to splendour as a baroque garden with elements of English-Mediterranean landscaping.
Malta’s lack of respect for gardens is shocking. The president can be forgiven her failure to understand architectural integrity or the beauty and purpose of gardens – which is to lift and refine the spirit. She confuses gardens with outdoor play space, which are an entire thing altogether.
The palace garden exists for quiet and meditation among botanical serenity – that was the original purpose of gardens and that original purpose has never changed since.
To turn what should be a serene and meditative space into a playground for shouting children with a Speaker’s Corner is offensive. That can happen elsewhere, but Malta has few baroque gardens, and those few should be cherished and restored to their proper purpose and glory.
Hyde Park is a completely different space: it is vast and not part of the architecture of a palace. It is freely open to bicycles, footballs, musicians, picnics and the rest. It is the – in terms of use – equivalent of Ta’ Qali and not of San Anton Palace.
I am truly disappointed. Instead of much-needed restoration, San Anton Palace garden is clearly going to get the ‘rampant hamallagni’ treatment.
President Coleiro Preca probably means well, but she fails to understand that what Maltese children lack most of all is not a speaker’s corner and life skills (though those too), but exposure to real beauty. This is what leads to the coarsening of the spirit and sentiment that we see all around us in our fellow countrymen and women.
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Shouldn’t the gardens be scheduled by MEPA so that no works are done in them. Intelligent people who know the importance of the gardens will cry out at the idea… all the rest will love it.
[Daphne – The gardens are scheduled already. The sort of thing the president has in mind will not require planning permission because the likelihood is that most of it will be constructed in wood and plastic.]
San Anton Palace and Gardens are Scheduled as a “Grade 1 property in terms of Structure Plan Policy UCO 7”.
Structure Plan Policy UCO 7 states:
Grade 1: These are buildings of outstanding historical or architectural interest that demand to be preserved in their entirety. Demolition or alterations which impair the setting or change the external or internal appearance, including anything contained within the curtilage of the building will not be allowed. Any interventions allowed must be directed to their scientific restoration and rehabilitation.
This makes it unlikely that permission will be granted for any structural alterations or constructions required, but…
Oh yes and MEPA will slap the president with an enforcement notice will it? Mhux hekk jibqghu!
Are there also plans for a Speaker’s corner? Would be great on a Sunday morning to listen to Anglu Farrugia “it-taks force” ranting from the top of a ladder.
What I have always failed to understand is why all that money was spent to refurbish and open to public a pathetic little piece of land/farmhouse called the President Garden when a majestic land/garden with centuries of history and beauty lies within few metres almost abandoned and derelict with little effort to upkeep its beauty?!
I always found it outright stupid that horses, donkeys and other animals are kept in small cages/rooms in said President Garden when empty big and spacious structures which used to host and offer shelter to large animals such as camels are left empty and unused in San Anton Gardens.
And to complement the project rest assured that a kiosk will be opened selling hotdogs and junk food to children.
The idea could be put to better use in the Chinese garden. It might remind everyone that freedom of speech has to be imposed on China because it doesn’t come as part of the package.
There was a letter to the Malta Independent this week, condemning this blog as some elitist agglomeration of snobs led by Deafnie.
Little does A.Borg understand that all here share an impossible dream to elevate this place to spiritual and thus aesthetic completion.
The function of a garden is exactly the one succintly outlined above, be at one with nature.
When the garden happens to have a style pertaining to the most flamboyant of styles, enriched by British romanticism, the moral obligation to uphold the resulting form is in the national interest.
That this argument has to be denigrated, censored even, along a dogma of ignorance posing as some egalitarian appeal to the lowest common denominator, (how’s that for condescendence A.Borg?) this blog remains a source of hope and ‘unstoppable’ resistance to the hatred of anything light.
So this blog is artificial, and isn’t artifice that which makes life bearable?
I remember when the Tamarisk saplings along Sliema Front were lit, hela ta’ flus, Milied is-sena kollha, or the even more uncouth denigration of the bridge to nowhere. No it wasn’t, it brought back a little strip of Malta back to shore.
And if the destination remains nowhere, well, isn’t that what we have to face, understand, digest and overcome?
Why beauty, its splendour and underlying pain has to be destroyed and consumed for instant gratification, solely reduced to material sensibilties of the lowest kind remains your problem and dilemma, A.Borg.
Indeed, ask yourself why anything you yearn for inhibits value, whereas what you don’t understand remains constant if not gains value, monetary included. That maybe it is your choices that leave you enslaved, as Maltese, dry and concise as ever, describes perfectly; dejjem neqsin.
Then you’ll realise that what’s written here is an appeal to deserve better, everyone included.
http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2014-05-11/letters/daphne-and-her-spade-a-requiem-4936237058/
They worried about a bridge that leads to nowhere.
I worry about a government that is leading to nowhere.
That’s what one gets when the riffraff take over.
Now that they have stormed the Bastille they will show no mercy and what little we have preserved and left by those who came before us will be gradually but steadily desecrated.
When recently, just before George Abela’s term of office came to an end, he held an open day for children the gardens with the theme ‘meet the president’, what happened was absolutely awful.
Children trampling on the flowers, climbing trees and throwing stones into the ponds and the parents looking on with no word of reprimand.
Is this what we want the gardens to be turned into?
I agree with the argument, although I do think that using terms such as “rampant hamallagni” only serves to burn bridges when I believe that, if the President means well, she would be willing to listen to a case for restoring San Anton to its former glory.
[Daphne – I don’t know about you, Matthew, but I don’t think we should be regressing to the era when people had to dance or tiptoe around the ego of a head of state. Marie Louise Coleiro Preca is hardly Le Roi Soleil.]
I do not think that discussion/dialogue amounts to “dancing or tiptoeing around the ego of a head of state”.
[Daphne – No, you said that if I accuse her of rampant hamallagni, she will get upset, sulk, stamp her feet and refuse to discuss what’s wrong with her plan. In other words, petulance…Incidentally, I don’t think she’s that way.]
I guess that if you accuse anyone of being a “rampant hamallu/a” – President or not – then s/he will probably (and, in my opinion, rightly) take offence and that leads to the breakdown of dialogue.
[Daphne – I am not in dialogue with the president, and if I were, I would not use that expression. I am an independent observer, and not a negotiator with the president for the restoration of a garden that is not hers.]
Indeed, I do believe that those who disagree with the President’s plan should email/write to the President’s Office, expressing their views. Maybe a pressure/lobby group can be formed, which can ask for a meeting with the President and explain its views.
To meet with the President so that she can explain her views? She shouldn’t even have thought about the plan, let alone discuss it and implement it.
‘those who disagree with the President’s plan should email/write to the President’s Office’
Let’s stop this amateurish nonsense. There are experts for that sort of thing and it is these people that should be consulted.
We have in fact experts for everything working for this government including one looking for garages, one who will be paid for 2 years for a 2 week job and a trail of invisible ambassadors and representatives from the USA to China.
I shudder to think that it might become a second Kennedy Grove. Ma x’biza.
Ok Matthew, if the head of state has to be told her idea contradicts her role, perhaps she has no place in San Anton.
I don’t even want to move an inch what has to or cannot be done. When the idea is so insipid to exclude anything beyond Malta hanina hobza u sardina, refusing to engage in ‘dialogue’ is dialogue itself.
Let’s sell all works of art and national treasures to provide for the poor shall we? Because that’s what’s happening here, the garden is a whole, it’s architecture, not something which hasn’t yet been put to good use. Or unbuilt.
If she, and the average Maltese, (I take full responsibility for that) don’t even distinguish the garden for the trees, utility an excuse to vandalise memory, taste the result thereof, geometry unchangeable and truth irrevocable, perhaps it’s time they moved. Just this once.
I’ve had people over who just couldn’t understand the national allergy to colour, scent, proportion, harmony, silence, void or method.
This is not the time to revert to gentle patronising of the pleb, which perhaps is what describes those whose indolence traps them in a cult unforgiving of any other language, to save one’s skin. And maybe keep privilege.
We know what happened when that was tried, two decades of total isolation and mental rape.
Where’s Astrid’s molto pittoresco bunch when you need them? Or Pamela Hansen, Marie Benoit and all the other Malta bene who’ll drop names and titles for a living?
Things will come to a head and this will be fundamental. There will be those who’ll push for ‘restoration’ and those who’ll approve of Her Excellency’s social misanthropy.
Restoration implies mindset, reconciliation failed.
Restoration, Jozef. Like Charles II’s return.
We must restore glory and beauty, and in beauty find joy. For have banished joy.
She is neither worth nor worthy of the effort.
San Anton Gardens Taghna Lkoll – who needs a meditating space when people nowadays confuse a quiet place with dead space.
How about a ‘serpentine’-style ducking stool as an aquatic naughty step?
This would make me very sad. As a child I loved going to San Anton. As I got older and realized how sad and mistreated those animals were I still enjoyed walking along those bumpy stone paths through all those trees.
Now, older still, I am happy that the animals aren’t there anymore. But I miss it and sincerely hope that parents teach their children to appreciate how amazing that place is, without the need for cheap attractions.
I have no qualms with the place being open to the public for a fee, but don’t turn it into a theme park or a setting for weddings…for goodness’ sake!
For all intents and purpose the president is only a curator for the San Anton Palace Garden and the Verdala Castle and has the privilege to live in them during his/her term.
Can anyone please lend a good dictionary to the queen who does not know the distinction between garden, orchard, heath, common, green, park, let alone the refined definitions of a baroque garden and the likes.
I don’t know what part of San Anton gardens figures in the President’s plans mentioned here, but unless the position has changed in recent months, the public area of San Anton gardens does not fall under the jurisdiction of the President. I doubt the Hyde Park idea refers to the public area, though.
The President controls the President’s Garden situated across the road at the side of San Anton Palace — under Dr. Abela’s presidency known as the President’s Kitchen Garden — and the private part of San Anton garden including the citrus grove. I think the latter part of the garden is the one which was referred to recently as open to newly-weds for taking photos but I stand to be corrected.
I am posting this simply by way of information. Perhaps one may check its accuracy.
You see, this is why I am in love with Daphne’s brain.
She speaks of beauty.
I did not bother to read through her plans for the gardens. When I read the title children’s Hyde Park, it was enough to put me off.
Could she not have chosen some original name for her plan? Dan ghax xi darba marret Londra, or is it some bright suggestion from Norman Hamilton, who thought of this original idea.
I’ve been to San Anton very recently and I found it lovely. There are several varieties of beautiful flowers all well maintained. Also, several ducks, geese, swans, fish and terrapins. The ducks and geese wander freely next to visitors along with several peacocks. Further up near the kitchen garden there are other animals and birds. I disagree that exotic creatures be kept in cages for our amusement.
Why doesn’t she invest in a proper pianoforte and start hosting talented musicians to perform in the garden, thus offering a new stage within a different, fresher and original environment?