In this lovely park everything reminded Tolstoy of his mother. The Lower Park was her favourite place to walk; here she used to plant roses, nut-bushes, and also burning-bushes that are quite unnoticeable in the summer, but in the autumn they suddenly start «flaring» like bright rosy-red «bonfires» scattered all over the park. Around the Upper Pond there still grow descendants of the silver poplars that Tolstoy’s mother also planted here. And in a tall Summerhouse-tower in the far corner of the park, according to a family legend, she would often spend time looking at the road and waiting for her husband to come back home. When the English park was being laid out, the ravine was dammed up in two places. There appeared a cascade of three ponds: the Upper pond, the Middle Pond, and the Lower Pond. Elegant little birch bridges were laid across the streams feeding the Lower Pond, and narrow winding paths spread throughout the park in all directions. In the old days, the Upper Pond served as a kind of temporary «fish-well» for the fish caught for the landlord’s family. The Middle Pond is the cleanest and the deepest of all the ponds at Yasnaya, and is spring-fed, so it remains very cold even in the summer. In 1890s a bathing-hut was built on the Middle Pond. The bathing-hut could look different in different years: sometimes it was made from wood boards, and sometimes from brushwood. Today visitors to Yasnaya Polyana can see the bathing-hut woven from willow twigs – the way it looked in the early 20th century. In Tolstoy’s time, the family swam in this pond, and the linen was also washed here. When the water in the Middle pond rises high, the water flows down the wooden gutters into the Lower Pond that is located in the lowest part of the ravine. «Today walking around the garden I was, as always, thinking of my mother, my mama whom I don’t even remember, but who has remained for me a sacred ideal» (Leo Tolstoy. Diary).