A very short and very disorienting walk from the hamlet of Orekhovno in western Russia

Date walked:  27th September 2019

Distance: 4 miles or so

Map used: no printed maps available

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Google Orekhovno, and I expect the first listing you’ll see is for a garden in Russia created by Alexander Grivko of Il Nature Landscape Design  and his partner Mark Dumas. Switch to googling images and you’ll find a lot of pictures of the outskirts of Moscow and none of the garden.  Go figure. The garden is the reason that I was here and it is a long way from Moscow – about 430 miles by road.  The Estonian border in the middle of Lake Peipus is about 50 miles away as the crow flies.

I arrived by sleeper train from Moscow. Well, to Pustoshka station on the Moscow to Riga Latvian Express, and then by car. Express it is not, but this train (one of two travelling between Moscow and Riga) has the most wonderful licensed slightly Deco styled restaurant car  Here’s a very poor pic of it, with my temporary companion/minder/translator Anna.

Anna works for Grivko and it was her that had invited me to come and photograph the garden and to stay in the house that Grivko has had built there.  Inside and out the house is a scaled-down fantasy French chateau; the contrast, I was to discover, with the vernacular architecture could not have been greater.

I was there for 4 nights and enjoyed the most perfect weather for my photography; crisp frosty mornings with a pure sunlight that showed off the garden at its best. Here’s just one of the hundreds of images I came away with.  I will be writing about the garden for Thinkingardens some time, also for Topiarus magazine and GAP Photos will soon have a set of the images from the visit.

For the best garden photography you generally need to be in the garden at dawn and dusk which leaves the bulk of the day for catching up on sleep and doing whatever else takes your fancy. And after a couple of days I fancied a walk.

Photographing the garden had given me some sight of the surrounding countryside; this was fairly open terrain with gently undulating hills and some woodland. Walking out of the house I turned right onto the gravel-surfaced single track lane. This very quickly became a green lane, and coming slowly towards me was an elderly (meaning older than my 64 years by some margin ) woman carrying a yoke with two full pails of water. Surprised doesn’t cover it. I was shocked. This could only mean that she was living in a place without running water. I mumbled a hello and received the same (I think).

I doubt that this was her idea of healthy weight-bearing exercise

I passed several houses over the next mile , though the word house doesn’t seem quite right word.

Cottage, perhaps, would be closer , though “shack” might better suit the basic nature of their construction. Most had wooden planks for walls and corrugated tin or felt and batten roofs. The windows were few and mostly glazed, often with pretty fretwork above them. These were homes, for sure, but most did not appear to be lived in, the poles which had carried electricity to them bare of any cables.

Some were clearly abandoned, their brick chimneys leaning perilously close to collapse and the felt coverings perforated and worn out. Others, though, gave a sense of still being looked after, and at least lived in for some of the time if not permanently, their porches swept and woodwork repaired and renewed.

Outside one such place …..

….. I found the source of my woman’s water. Into a deep concrete-lined well poured water from a plastic pipe.

But around most of these ruins, the grass had grown high and bramble and young trees were beginning to establish themselves and reclaim their front gardens. And yet they were mostly not wholly abandoned. A newish Yale lock on a front door showing that someone still retained an interest, and in others the grass had been beaten down revealing at least an occasional visitor.

Alongside the track, fixed to a metal railing was a blue telephone box.

I assumed that it would have been disconnected and lifted the receiver. The equipment was not that old and it had a dialling tone.  And checking my phone I found that I had a 3G quality signal.

At this point I would say that I felt slightly disorientated. I was somewhere where I did not understand, almost as if it were a dream.

The last house was probably about a mile from where I was staying, but the track continued, though now the grass was growing quite high in its middle.

The countryside was no easier for me to understand than the settlement. Over to the left and right were youthful looking woodlands of several different tree species and in the long grass other individual trees were clearly establishing themselves.

In some places, small colonies of conifer were growing well.

I could see that some of the land was waterlogged, but stands of young silver birch had grown through and at the edge of the standing water.

On higher ground the woods became thicker….

… and in the distance the woodland looked quite dense, exhibiting a tapestry of autumn colour indicating some range of species.

But I saw absolutely no sign (apart, perhaps from this track) of any cultivation or management of this land. No hedges, no fences, no abandoned machinery, signs or barns. And yet, I thought to myself, this land must have been used for something at some point; these were not ancient woods and the land must have been cleared by someone, sometime.

As I walked along the ever fainter track I peered down at the plants that were growing. Most of the species were familiar to me.

A geranium of some sort

Wild strawberry?

Others were less familiar and I could not name……

…. but collectively I didn’t know how to interpret this flora as far as making a stab at the soil and I saw nothing that suggested previous crops.

After a while the track divided into a couple of even fainter ones. I followed one up the hill until it came to a halt for no reason that I could discern

I retraced my steps, enjoying the warmth and the open views of this mysterious landscape, but none the wiser.

At the outskirts of where the buildings had stopped my curiosity about these houses got the better of me. I approached one place that had no track to it and was clearly not lived in and tried the ill-fitting door.

It opened reluctantly to reveal a porch of sorts, its pretty and  intact window illuminating several wooden crates of household rubbish, the floor being strewn with the same.

The floor was somewhat bouncy, suggesting that its hidden timbers were not that sound, so I progressed with caution. A similar little room held a couple of chairs, an open and rusty suitcase full of electrical bits and bobs, some children’s toys and a squash racket.

A bedroom off to one side had beds and bedding and little else, the patterned wallpaper peeling off and littering the floor.

Beyond this was the main living room. This I found really quite disturbing. There was a powerful sense of a house once lived in being suddenly abandoned or at least its occupants gone (or removed?). On the table was a vase of withered flowers, books and magazines, a toy gun.

I couldn’t, and still can’t, get my head around how a family could leave a home in this state. The books, surely, had some value or would have been given away, the vase put in a box to take to the next home? What on earth happened here?

On another table there was a box of Christmas decorations. Well used, cheap probably and some broken  but who would leave their Christmas decorations behind? I picked one out and put it in my pocket. Next to the table was a heap of clothes on the floor.

In the bathroom above a sink a rusty metal cabinet had several bottles of medicines and a shaving brush.

On the walls in one room (a boy’s bedroom?) some posters were peeling off the wall. I recognised  Sylvester Stallone from the film Rocky. My guess this was from the first film which came out in 1976. So the place was lived in then, but when was it left? And Why?

What must have been a cooking range was wrecked, the oven removed.

In the alcove where the oven or range had been was a dust-covered book.

When writing this up I tried to translate the title but failed.

I don’t know what made me leave the place. I was in no hurry to be anywhere but I think I had reached a point where I couldn’t take any more in.  On my way out I passed a crate of empty vodka bottles. Why keep so many?

On a wall someone had stuck up some labels from beer? bottles.

Someone had named a room with a blue and white  enamel sign, but even though the letters were clear I still can’t find a way to translate them. Perhaps someone reading this can?

And this place was just 10 minutes walk from the house that I was staying in.

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For my journey back to the UK I wrapped the decoration in some tissues and gently put it in the toe of my walking shoe. It survived the trip.

So this year we have a new decoration that will, I hope, evoke memories of this strange and not altogether comfortable experience.

An odd thing to wish for perhaps? But I wish you, my readers, a very

Happy Christmas

Some of these images, and others I took on another short walk from Orekhovno, are available for sales at Getty Images.