Nowadays a lot of rare or difficult information has become easily accessible to lay-readers. When one reaches a particular thrilling find,by perusing google-entries not real books, it almost seems unfair... bt there's no point in denying the possible significance of what sometimes chance places on our way. After searching for parhelia and brocken (both words employed by Nabokov), I came to the light-effect creating an aureole, a halo, a "glory." Next, I wondered if garden pergolas (such as the Schöenbrunn Palace's belvedere, named "gloriette", where I first heard this word*) were anywhere connected to some kind or aureole. Apparently, not.

 

What led me on to extend the search was a sentence from Nabokov's memoirs, indirectly related to his brother Sergey:

 "That twisted quest for Sebastian Knight (1940), with its gloriettes and self-mate combinations, is really nothing in comparison to the task I balked in the first version of this memoir and am faced with now" (SM, 257).  

Suddenly, I alighted onto two words related to a "gloriette". Both, perhaps, strongly emphasized in "ADA" (and, in retrospect, they add a coloring to Nabokov's sole reference to "gloriettes" in connection to the hard task it was for him to write about his brother. 

One of the words is the English term: "Glory Hole." The other, "Arbor".

 

The first one, a Glory Hole, indicates a place where objects are thrown or lie in confusion, but the author, Adrian Room, notes that the "place is not so called since there is a glorious muddle in it, even though there probably is. The origin may well be in Scottish "glaury", meaning "muddy", "miry". However, by a curious but disconcerting coincidence, the French word for 'summer house', 'arbour', is "gloriette", and this does actually come from Latin "gloria"m "glory".  But the original meaning of this word was "palace", so there is unlikely to be any association with the English glory hole. A dictionary of true etymologies -  Adrian Room - 1986 - Language Arts & Disciplines books.google.com.br/books?isbn=0415030609...

 

The other, Arbours or Arbors, originally " herber " or " erber,"  comes from O. Fr. herbier, from Lat. herbarium, a collection of herbs, herba, grass; Later the word came to be spelt " arber " through its pronunciation, as in the case of Derby, and by the 16th century was written " arbour" See also: Lat. arbor, tree, and garden:from O. Fr. garden, mod. Fr. jardin; this, like our words " garth," a paddock attached to a building, and " yard," comes from a Teutonic word for an enclosure which appears in Gothic as gards and O. H. Ger. gart, cf. Dutch gaarde and Ger. .garten); The application of the word has shifted from the grass-covered ground, the proper meaning, to the covering of trees overhead . " Arbor " (from the Latin for " tree ") http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/APO_ARN/ARBOUR_or_ARBOR_originally_herb.html#ixzz1FeF6CnJ6

 

There are no gloriettes in ADA, but "arbors" in profusion. The various references to arbor indicate (to me) Nabokov's familiarity with the link bewteen a luxuriant bower and the gloriette, and a fascination this architectural appendix, herbarium, cage and dirty hole exerted on him.**  

 

 

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* wiki: "A gloriette (from the 12th century French for "little glory") is a building in a garden erected on a site that is elevated with respect to the surroundings. The structural execution and shape can vary greatly, often in the form of a pavilion or tempietto, more or less open on the sides..The largest and probably most well-known gloriette is in the Schönbrunn Palace Garden in Vienna. Built in 1775 as the last building constructed in the garden according to the plans of Austrian imperial architect Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg as a "temple of renown" to serve as both a focal point and a lookout point for the garden, it was used as a dining hall and festival hall as well as a breakfast room for emperor Franz Joseph I...The word "gloriette" can also refer to a large birdcage, similar in form to the architectural gloriette, often made out of wrought iron or, more rarely, wood. In the garden of the Priory of Notre-Dame d'Orsan, many wood gloriettes decorate and overshadow the alleys. Climbing plants are often associated with this type of construction".

http://www.azsia.net/index.php? module=My_eGallery&do=showpic&pid=580&orderby=dateD

See also: "Recent research at Chepstow Castle has identified a chamber known by the name ‘Gloriette’. Other buildings with this name have previously been identified at Corfe, Leeds and Hesdin Castles and at Canterbury Cathedral Priory. ‘Gloriette’ has usually been explained as a reference to a type of garden building in the Islamic world, transposed to northern Europe either from Spain or Sicily, though the word's etymology, and the particularities of each site make this interpretation difficult. The architectural differences between oriental garden pavilions and 13th-century Gothic chambers, and the particular association of the term with castles rather than unfortified manors, suggest an alternative meaning. It is proposed that ‘Gloriette’ was more immediately a reference to a 12th-century chanson de geste, ‘la Prise d'Orange’, in which the name was used for an exotic marble tower. In this chanson, ‘Gloriette’ was the scene of romantic and military adventures of the kind to which Christian knights might aspire. However, the recurrent association of the word with Islamic Spain suggests that European patrons adopted it with these connotations of a sophisticated alien culture in mind." www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/jba/2004/00000157/.../art00006

.** - Excerpts from "ADA" mentioning "Arbor"

1. "In fact he was beginning to like very much arbors and ardors and Adas. They rhymed. Should he mention it?"
2. "As the first flame of day reached his hammock, he woke up another man — and very much of a man indeed. ‘Ada, our ardors and arbors’ — a dactylic trimeter that was to remain Van Veen’s only contribution to Anglo-American poetry — sang through his brain."
3. "That night because of the bothersome blink of remote sheet lightning through the black hearts of his sleeping-arbor, Van had abandoned his two tulip trees and gone to bed in his room."
4. "Last night I tried to make a poem about it for you, but I can’t write verse; it begins, it only begins: Ada, our ardors and arbors — but the rest is all fog, try to fancy the rest.’"
5." Because it had come from the blood-red érable arbors of Ardis."
6. "Because the particular floramor that I visited for the first time on becoming a member of the Villa Venus Club (not long before my second summer with my Ada in the arbors of Ardis) is today, after many vicissitudes, the charming country house of a Chose don whom I respect..."
7. " he was in the middle of his twentieth trudge’ back to the ardors and arbors! Eros qui prend son essor! Arts that our marblery harbors: Eros, the rose and the sore,’ I am ill at these numbers, but e’en rhymery is easier ‘than confuting the past in mute prose.’ Who wrote that? Voltimand or Voltemand? Or the Burning Swine? A pest on his anapest!"
8. "She had never realized...that their first summer in the orchards and orchidariums of Ardis had become a sacred secret and creed, throughout the countryside. Romantically inclined handmaids... adored Van, adored Ada, adored Ardis’s ardors in arbors. Their swains, plucking ballads on their seven-stringed Russian lyres under the racemosa in bloom or in old rose gardens (while the windows went out one by one in the castle)... Gardeners paraphrased iridescent Persian poems about irrigation and the Four Arrows of Love...And another century would pass, and the painted word would be retouched by the still richer brush of time.Members usually had their chauffeurs park in a special enclosure near the guardhouse...But that night several huge police cars occupied the garage boxes and overflowed into an adjacent arbor...His favorite walled walk soon took him to one of the spacious lawns velveting the approach to the manor."
9. " I cannot express, dear Van, how unhappy I am, the more so as we never learned in the arbors of Ardis that such unhappiness could exist."
10. "When after three or four hours of frenetic love Van and Mrs Vinelander would abandon their sumptuous retreat ...they had the feeling of still being under the protection of those painted Priapi that the Romans once used to set up in the arbors of Rufomonticulus."
11. "Ardis Hall — the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis — this is the leitmotiv rippling through Ada, an ample and delightful chronicle...Nothing in world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoy’s reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the ‘Ardis’ part of the book"