Saint Donatus Park. Romance in a 19th-century landscape park

We are standing here in a place where we have a good view over the city park. In 1868, a competition was held, which was won by the Leuven landscape architect Jacques Rosseels, among other things because the wall and the tower were preserved. However, it was the jury member Fuchs from Ixelles who decided which plants would be used.

Jacques Rosseels was the son of Guillelmus, known from the Leuven Botanical Garden, and the brother of Egidius, who was internationally renowned. The family lived in Leuven for four generations and had their own cultivation fields. They laid out gardens in France, Germany, and the Netherlands.

The park is a typical English landscape park in response to the rigid and geometrically laid-out French garden. The concept already emerged in the mid-18th century and actually reflects what philosophy emerged at that time, such as the admiration for untouched nature in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Until the beginning of the 19th century, it was mainly about smaller, intimate private gardens. The later landscape style (from around 1800-1870) is characterized by more openness and grandeur. It is, therefore, the ideal landscape style for public walking parks.

Characteristics include:

- without symmetry and balance.
- winding paths and connecting circular walks around oval-shaped plant and grass areas. The whimsical shapes of the paths and avoiding any straight lines allowed for a continually changing view of the picturesque garden.
- surprising vistas, given shape by the arrangement of lawns, preferably on hilly terrain, surrounded and interspersed with groups of trees. To evoke the illusion of a landscape within this relatively small area, he utilized height differences, grass fields with groups of trees, and a central pond, serving as a romantic mirror surface.
- water is an important component, artificial ponds,
- romanticism through rock formations and a ruin.
- simple pavilions erected, but sculptures became scarce.
- solitary trees

Here, the adjacent buildings are obscured from view by trees, rather than from the sides of the adjoining streets. The dense border planting along the street sides was meant to make the location in the city center forgotten. Many people find the English garden to feel more natural. In reality, many exotics, such as conifers, grow here, but also the locally significant plane trees and chestnuts are originally non-native.

Jan Rymenams