©Zelenka Studio
Tatyana Lazareva
Russia
Tatyana Lazareva began her career as a landscape architect in 2002. She was born in 1985 in Russia in a small town 220 km from Moscow, the city of Ryazan. Her dad is a military man and her family lived for a long time in the north, on the shores of the White Sea on the island of Yagra. Summer was always short, so the flowers in their apartment did not take root. One day, a cactus sprout was brought to her, and she was just at the school propagating plants. Inspired, she propagated this cactus in incredible quantities, and since then, flower cultivation has become her main interest.
She started reading specialized literature, her mother began to buy her magazines on floriculture and landscape architecture. This was the starting point in choosing a profession. She graduated at the Agricultural Academy and the Architectural Institute. Candidate of agricultural sciences on the topic of lawns and soil sodding, author of over 20 scientific articles and patents for inventions, she built more than seventy complete garden projects in Russia, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Since 2007, she is owner and landscape architect in her gardening workshop Zelenka Studio.
I was greatly influenced by the work of Luciano Giubbilei. I remember meeting with him and listening to his lecture. Then I returned to the office and revised the concepts of some gardens completely. For more than 10 years now, I have been admiringly watching his work. I am also a fan of Katherine Gustavson. There are not many women in our profession, in my opinion she is an incredibly talented architect. Her Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain in Hyde Park is a very powerful job!
There are 2 such gardens. The first is the garden of my great-grandmother. It so happened that a large market was built on the site of the house, but the garden remained and I walked around it many times and tried to imagine how everything was there, what was the house, what paths … The second is the garden of Villa Erba. In my opinion, this is a beautiful English-style garden. In 2019, I fulfilled my dream of visiting it when I represented Russia at Orticolario contest at Villa Erba.
SELECTED PROJECTS
Kostantinovo
The garden is in the village of Konstantinovo, Ryazan region, homeland of the great Russian poet Sergei Yesenin. There are sweet memories linked to this region and we tried to convey them in our project. In this garden, we made an attempt to convey the spontaneity that plants in nature have. We did not seek to copy nature, we wanted to convey a sense of naturalness and miraculous. The main role is assigned to decorative cereals with picturesque spikelets and panicles with broken thin leaves and discreet field perennials with parasol inflorescences. They – not bright and large garden flowers – are responsible for beauty in this garden. Color does not play a special role in the concept, but it is easy to notice that in this garden, lilac, violet and purple palette predominate. The garden is all season. We have a special thrill of “beautifully dying” plants. In our opinion, the shoots of faded plants have their own vintage beauty, you just need to get used to it and learn how to see it. And in winter, silver plated with hoarfrost, they serve as the main decoration of the landscape. At first glance, it may seem that the garden is spontaneous, careless, deliberately naive, but it is not! Such lightness is the result of great and meticulous work. We carefully thought over the compositions and selected combinations of plants taking into account the background, illumination and landscape. The style of modern meadow thickets looks great next to the ensemble of buildings on the site and is philosophical.
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Stingrays Garden
The main purpose of any garden: to cause emotions. Creating this garden, we completely revised the usual aesthetics of garden design. Our artistic language is a state-of-the-art eclectic combination of various materials with a touch of vintage eccentrics and necessarily with expensive accessories that acquire the importance of family relics. Creating this garden, we were not guided by fashion trends, but by a sense of beauty. We created the history of the deep sea with its strange inhabitants, stingrays “sea devils”, bioluminescent creatures, phosphorescent plankton. Night illumination of the details of the garden clearly conveys the atmosphere of unknown depths, details of life invisible to us under a layer of water.
