Colour the world

One of the Wonders of the World, Hanging Gardens of Babylon – is it a myth or reality? We don’t know that for sure and, unfortunately, we won’t ever see them. But in Germany there is a small flower island where RUDN University students created their own unusual gardens and hundreds of tourists come to the island to look at them.

RUDN University students were offered to take part in a competition in Landscape design at an annual exhibition “Seasonal gardens” on Mainau Island. The island is a surprising place – all the territory of 45 hectares is covered with parks and gardens. Every year Mainau receives more than a million guests.

“When we came to the island, the host side gave us a tour around the island territory and showed us previous year gardens made by students. They were so beautiful and creative! For example, the idea of one design was pictures of nature – there were frames everywhere through which you could see surrounding vegetation. It looked like these were the pictures painted by the nature. It was very inspiring – I wanted to start creating straight away!” one of the participants of the contest says.

The first stage of work was Russian-German landscape Workshop, where the participants worked out the design of their gardens. The theme of the year’s contest was “The unanimity of diversity”.In the process of the Workshop Russian and German students split into teams and developed the ideas of projects in one day. The main task was to create a functional, convenient garden where a person would stay for a long time. As a result of the work the participants presented a poster where they depicted the garden’s plan and all necessary explications. Then they performed their projects before the committee.

The winners of the Workshop received a chance to actually build the gardens - the organizers of the contest provided the winners with a piece of land and construction materials, also they were awarded with certificates and financial incentives. Among the lucky winners were four Russian-German teams, their ideas were recognized to be the best. Their projects are called Way of colors, Breaking the walls, Merging cultures, The harmony of life. For example, in the garden of Rigina Chernaya and Luc Schuler, which is called “Merging cultures”, apart from trees and flowers there were yellow, blue and red posts embedded in the ground. These coloured posts represented different nationalities of the world. According to the idea of the project visitors come to the garden, spend their time in a beautiful place and write their names on any post, leaving a part of themselves, their nationality and their people in the garden.

The garden of Olesya Sadekova and Nicola Winter is called “Way of Colors”. In order to make it the students put ring-shaped wood flooring - a path that goes through bushes and flowers of all kinds and shades. This path symbolizes the way of colours.

The second stage of the project: from an idea of a garden to its actual building. Excavators, concrete-mixing machine, drills and other professional construction machinery. Specially trained young builders and mechanics helped the students with all that . It all took only one week to complete, and after building of ornamental parts of the gardens and planting of the trees, bushes and flowers the gardens burst into blossom.

The construction of Seasonal gardens attracted reporters from a regional German newspaper - they interviewed the participants and wrote a captivative article. Alevtina Afonina, one of the winners of the competition, mentions, “After all this hard work the opening of the exhibition finally happened. I was walking through the gardens admiring our creations and I was really proud of us when I unintentionally overheard the words of praise of the delighted visitors of the island. Everyone was really excited!”