Out of town stops: Senica
Bára Lungová
I discovered these front gardens when I was staying in a nearby hotel on Nádražní street. A row of small apartment blocks built along the street in the 1950s is lined by a rather wide stretch of lawn, a fence going alongside it, a sidewalk, and front gardens between the sidewalk and the fence in some cases, parking spaces in others. The situation apparently differs according to the negotiations among the flat owners themselves in the respective buildings. In some houses, the creative gardeners only had improvised flower pots at their disposal (because the rest of the space was taken up by parking spaces); some of the neighboring houses boasted such a display of creativity, diversity, and even coziness that one would rather expect it in a private garden (the aesthetic being rather closer to an allotment garden than a sober, manicured garden found in modern, single-home residential areas).
In this particular front garden, documented in Polina Davydenko’s photographs, there is a miniature lake, a plastic statue of an old woman (asking for a contribution for garden maintenance – in my view), a miniature ruin built of bricks, a garden clock on a trellis, the obligatory bench, a tank for water storage, and a whole array of plants - there must be at least a hundred different species and varieties of them. The feeling of this space conveys a strange confusion between public space – it is squeezed just between a sidewalk and a strip of lawn which separates the housing area from a road. At the same time, you have the feeling of being inside someone’s garden because of the density of the creative inputs, the plethora of plants and trees, and also because of the fence separating the garden from one of its sides from the rest of the street. However, you never pass through any gate while walking past these front gardens. The fence might be a relic from some former spatial arrangement around the housing area, but is not very functional at present.
