Ola’s Garden
Albin Hillervik
Curator
[Text from the folder, Ola’s Garden ]
The garden was designed with a large pond in the middle. Instead of lawns, large surfaces were planted with ground cover such as sky-blue creeping speedwell and red-leaved ajuga. Walls of evergreen rhododendrons and conifers created shady labyrinthine paths.
The garden became Ola’s life’s work. It was a well-known attraction until one summer morning in July, just before he was to turn 80 years old, when he ended his life in the pond. Ystad municipality was offered to take over the operations, but they declined and the place fell into decay. Eventually, new owners took over, and the garden regained elements of its earlier splendor.
Karlsson Lundgren’s filmed images from the site depict a dusky oasis in its July vestments, with densely-packed boxwood, hydrangeas, and water lilies. The film goes backwards from darkness to light–from dusk to morning sunlight–and returns to darkness when it begins again. A circular time, with no beginning or end.
This links with Måns Holst-Ekström’s description in the adjacent text of the garden as “a permanent state of dissolution.”. Here, life exists alongside death. The constant and the transitory. A disciplined savagery. Arduous work and the longing for beauty.
Despite its division from the surrounding landscape, the garden is a world in itself, it carries with it history and relationships to other places. Or, as author and gardener Jamaica Kincaid writes in My Garden(book): “The world cannot be left out of a garden” and refers to both the power of weather and the colonial history of botany. In the same book, Kincaid writes that the garden fills her with thoughts of destruction. Holst-Ekström writes: “The art of the garden is merged with time.” Ola’s Garden contains a fateful story of a person who created his sanctuary in the world over forty years and who, at the end of his life, chose to become a part of its circular time.
The installation includes fifteen brass memorial plaques hanging throughout the museum’s second floor. The texts on the plaques come from Ola’s order sheets and historical plant catalogs from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alnarp. The texts are imprints of the catalogs’ descriptions and are traces of Ola’s purchases from all over the world, with the plaques carrying references to the taxonomy of botanical gardens.
The film and the memorial plaques reflect the place as a sanctuary formed as much by toil and hard work as by longing and desire. With this symbolic gesture, Ola’s garden has left its boundaries and gained a new home in the municipality’s art collection.