Mr. Gulbenkian’s Interrupted Garden

This book tells a story focused on an individual who played a very significant role in the making of this world from LES ENCLOS the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century. In 1891, while still young, he published an article in one of the world’s most famous journals entitled ‘Petroleum: the new source of energy’, a somewhat obvious claim now but groundbreaking back then.

He structured his entire professional life around the defining of petroleum production and distribution strategies, negotiating and building physical, contractual, and financial structures that ensured petroleum would be transformed into the energy source that revolutionised the twentieth century. His success turned him into the richest man in the world of his time; he was referred to as ‘Mr 5%’, the percentage of profit he took from the consortium he organised to bring together the then four largest oil companies to exploit oil in the former Turkish empire.

Calouste Gulbenkian (1869-1955) was a collector of the artistic masterpieces and also had a passion for gardens. Whenever he travelled, he kept a diary in which he recorded the landscapes through which he passed, making personal comments about the quality of each place and noting his impressions of the gardens he visited. He also had a leather notebook with alphabetical, handwritten entries of his favourite gardens.

At the age of sixty-nine, Gulbenkian purchased and merged various plots of land in order to make a ‘garden in my own manner’, as he later explained, on a promontory near Deauville with a view of the sea and with a south-facing slope. Work then began at Les Enclos. However, military operations during World War II devasted the site after 1941 and halted Gulbenkian’s planting of his garden.

In 1942, Calouste Gulbenkian moved to Lisbon, where he would live until his death. He maintained a regular correspondence with Saint-John Perse, a future Nobel Prize winner, eventually exchanging a total of eighty-nine letters. The pair shared their views regarding their dream of a beautiful garden in Normandy. Gulbenkian also weekly wrote to and received reports from his gardener, Garbis Selian, who kept him updated about everything that was happening in Les Enclos and always paid and supported a team that strove to counter the effects of the war. Few gardens are as well documented as Les Enclos. The sources gathered in the Gulbenkian Foundation archives enable us to craft a more complete portrait of Calouste Gulbenkian than the biographies have hitherto shown us. He was a sensitive man who enjoyed views of the sea, who protected those whom he cherished and who worked for him. He was also passionate about botany and birds and grasped the miracles of Nature and the artistic effusion triggered by its blooming beauty, very often connecting art to nature. Through so many archival documents, glimpses of a love story whose secret was very well kept emerge, but, in the midst of the letters dictated by Mr Gulbenkian and the places visited, this story emerges alongside their shared passion for gardens.

Acknowledgements

António Feijó
Preface

Chapter 1 — Introduction
Just like spinning woollen yarn. One hand pulling the yarn forward, while the other pulls it backward.

Chapter 2
The leather notebook. Romancing a garden ‘à ma façon’.

Chapter 3
Les Enclos. A garden during the war. Nature comes back.

Illustrations

Chapter 4
The garden that was never built. A garden dreamed of by Saint-John Perse (Douglas) and Calouste Gulbenkian (Douglas).

Chapter 5
The carbon paper. … and the invisible Mme Theis.

Chapter 6
Madame Real. The Villa Sassetti garden in Sintra.

Chapter 7
Every cloud has a silver lining. The Calouste Gulbenkian garden in Lisbon, 1969.

Illustrations

Chronology of Gulbenkian’s life

Bibliography

Appendix 1 — List of catalogues of plants and garden materials belonging to Calouste Gulbenkian

Appendix 2 — List of garden books belonging to Calouste Gulbenkian

List of Illustrations

Postface