Since I’ve been thinking about walking in
gardens, I inevitably thought about walking in parks, which inevitably meant I
returned to Travis Elborough’s book A Walk in the Park – now out in paperback - and I find this passage:
“There are
few sights in England that can quite equal the absurd charm of the imitation
Khyber Pass in Hull’s East Park. This slice of South Asia in the East Riding
sits just a short stroll away from an animal house that is home to alpacas from
Peru and a lake where oversized swan pedalo boats bob about. The park was
planned and opened to honour Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 and the
pass was dreamed up by its supervisor Edward Peak and fashioned in artificial
rock and material foraged from the Hull Citadel, an old fort that had once
defended the town’s port.”
Now it so happens that I know a couple of people with Hull
connections and they were familiar with East Park, and had even been walking
there, but perhaps inevitably they’d never heard of this Khyber Pass replica, despite
the presence in the park of this informative sign:
I think
you’d have to say that as replicas go it’s not the most faithful recreation you’ve
ever seen, especially since it involved the copy of an Arab doorway from Zanzibar, which doesn't seem to have a whole lot to do with the Khyber Pass.
The actual Khyber Pass
looked like this back then,
And it looks like this now:
And I began to wonder how easy it would be
to walk through dislocated or simulated geographical features of the world. The boundary wall of Piccadilly Gardens in
Manchester has been in the news lately - a Brutalist bit of concrete that locals
refer to as the Berlin Wall. It doesn’t
look so bad to me but it’s apparently “much hated” by locals, and the news is
that there are now plans to demolish it.
There used to be the Garden of Allah here in
Los Angeles, though not a garden at all, but a hotel on Sunset Boulevard run by
one Alla Nazimova (real name Adelaida Yakovlevna Leventon), and occasional home to the
likes of Errol Flynn, Dorothy Parker, Scott Fitzgerald et al. It was demolished in 1959, but a replica has
been being built at Universal Studios, Florida, and is used as a media center.
There is also the Garden of Gethsemane in
Tucson, which contains sculptures of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion which
(unless my biblical knowledge is even sketchier than I think it is) did not
take place in said garden.
The “real” Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem (its original location is disputed, so this may itself be a replica) looks like this:
There’s also London Bridge in Havasu
City, Arizona, which Mr. Elborough has written about at length, but that’s a
transplant of the thing itself, not a replica.
The Shoreline walking trail will take you right under it, through Rotary
Park.
So I emailed young Elborough and asked
him if he thought there was any meaningful distinction to be drawn between what constitutes a park and what constitutes a garden. He
offered this, “I think more generally public gardens tended be bequests of
existing private gardens - though not always - and usually smaller and
horticultural, lacking sports fields etc. but god knows!” That’s good enough for me, for now.
