Seminární zahrada

This guide to the Seminární zahrada in Český Krumlov starts by challenging the assumption that this walled terrace was ever built for its view. Jesuit fathers laid it out as the town's first ornamental garden sometime after sixteen sixty-two, sixty-five meters long and ruled into a strict chessboard of square beds, and the guide argues it was really a working plot of fruit trees and vegetables tended by men with little time for leisure. It then follows the garden's fortunes after the pope dissolved the Jesuit order in seventeen seventy-three, when early nineteenth-century maps show it reduced to a plain kitchen garden feeding a town that no longer needed a seminary at all.