This plan is a copy of the drawing designed for Vladislovas Tiškevičius's manor park around 1896. The palace, marked in red (A), serves only as a reference point on the plan: the part actually designed by the architect is the pair of symmetrical, ornately patterned parterre garden beds (C) beside the palace, framed by clipped hedges and tree-lined walks, with a tennis court (F) set among trees further on, along with several auxiliary buildings.
The park was commissioned by Vladislovas Tiškevičius, who had inherited the estate, and who engaged one of the most celebrated European landscape architects of the era — the Frenchman Édouard André (1840–1911), who from 1892 taught at the National School of Horticulture in Versailles. André visited Lentvaris in person — in September 1897, in May and June 1898, and in May and autumn 1899 — while the work on site was directed by the specialists he sent: the engineer Jules Buyssens and the stonemason Mr de Coulomb, assisted by the Polish craftsman Hudała. Zofia Potocka, a contemporary, recalled in her memoirs that the works were immense — earth was dug and levelled, hills raised and flattened, mature trees replanted, and the lakeshore planted with wide avenues.
The original drawing, made by André's own hand, is held in France, at the National School of Horticulture in Versailles (École nationale supérieure d'horticulture de Versailles), where the architect himself taught for many years. In the near future, the original will be specially brought to Lithuania for this exhibition — a rare chance to see this document here, in the very place it was made for.
The animation turns this flat 19th-century plan into a three-dimensional aerial view — letting you see how this meticulously planned parterre might have looked alive, from above, with the palace beside it.