An Unexpected Surprise

Sometimes its predictable what results a Google search will return - although when I was researching the history of rubber, I began with the keyword 'rubber' and some (in fact a surprising number) of the results were for websites of what one would call a specialist nature!

Be that as it may, sometimes Google throws up something unexpected and when I was looking for historical images of Stowe landscape this week, I got bonus.  Within the unprepossessing website called 'English for Architecture' is a page called Classical Readings - and what a gold mine it is.

Here are 11 classic garden history texts including Uvedale Price's An Essay on the Picturesque, William Gilpin's Observations on the River Wye and W H Matthews' Mazes and Labyrinths - and most are beautifully illustrated.

Thank you to the late Roberta Barresi for putting the site together.

The Tudor Garden

Another footstep forward in out journey through garden time.  Today the English garden under the Tudors.

Henry's Privy Garden at Hampton Court (image © J Foyle)

Regal Garden Making
After the Wars of the Roses, and the crowning of Henry Tudor as Henry VII in 1485, England entered the 16th century peaceful.  Garden making under Henry VIII was a distinctly kingly pass-time.  Henry regarded any outward sign of ostentation as a threat to the crown – a lesson Thomas Wolsey, who built Hampton Court, did not learn.  

Pond Garden, Hampton Court Palace

Hampton Court became Henry’s favourite palace, and here, in the 1530s Henry made the premier garden in England.  The only part of Henry's layout to survive subsequent alterations are the Pond Gardens - today filled with a riot of bedding plants in the summer months.

Knot & Railed Beds from The Gardener's Labyrinth (1577).

New Ideas
Along with the ingredients inherited from the Mediæval garden - raised beds, maze, turf seat, bower, and fountains, there was much evolution.  The beauties of Nature were further tamed, spurred on by Henry’s rivalry with France.  A new feature was the mount - a raised mound of earth crowned with an arbour or a seat.  This gave views out over the enclosing walls to the wilds of nature beyond, and down over the formally designed garden below.

The Old Palace & Knot Garden at Hatfield House

The Knot Garden
Within the garden itself, the raised bed developed into the knotted bed or knot.  The knot was square bed in which low hedges of box or thrift picked out a complicated geometrical pattern.  The compartments of the knot were planted with ornamental flowers or shrubs.  Topiary was a rediscovered novelty, while another new feature were railed beds – the whole garden being enclosed by low fences of wooden trellis.  Trellis was also used to make galleries, enclosed walks that connected various parts of the garden.  Two of King Henry’s favourite features were sundials and ‘Kings Beasts’.  The latter wooden poles painted to look like marble and surmounted with carved heraldic beasts that displayed of the King's power and pax.  

The Restored Elizabethan Garden at Kenilworth Castle

Elizabethan Extravagance
Henry’s daughter Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, but unlike her father saw ostentation as a sign of loyalty, and noblemen vied with each other to provide magnificent houses and gardens in which to entertain Her Majesty.  The change towards more linear, less defensive architecture was reflected in the garden.  Gardens were still walled in, for ornament rather than protection, but the most important introduction was the terrace. One of Elizabeth's favourite gardens - at Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire has recently been restored.

Terracing at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire

The Terrace
For the first time, the garden was intimately linked with the house, for example at Montecute in Somerset.  The terrace gave direct access from the house into the garden, kept the garden on the level and allowed views over the pleasure garden. Walks or ‘forthrights’ divided up the terraces into smaller areas - the favourite being a square.  These were filled with the familiar grass plats, mazes, and knot beds.  The patterns of the latter became more elaborate, as did arbours, which evolved into stone buildings such as gazebos.  Ornamentation also became increasingly popular and ornate and included statuary, topiary, sundials, fountains and pools, and the pleached allée.

Bowls
The final evolution was the lawn – a flowery mead with the flowers omitted.  Carefully nurtured, this was used to play bowls, a game immortalised by Drake.  So popular did it become that legislation was required in order to curb the huge rise in gambling. 

Also well worth visiting is the Tudor House and Garden in Southampton.

Mediaeval Gardens

Mary in a hortus conclusus

One of my favourite periods of garden history and one which is sadly neglected is the Mediaeval garden.  If you wish to know more,  John Harvey's Mediaeval Gardens (1981) is a masterful tome.  Albeit an expensive one these days.  There are also a couple of blogs worth visiting: St Mary de Haura and The Medieval Garden Enclosed.

Monastic Self sufficiency

While the Islamic world grew in size and created beautiful gardens, Europe entered a period well deserved of its title, ‘The Dark Ages’.  The peaceful conditions required for ornamental garden making were lost, but the missionary zeal of the monks took Christianity swiftly across Europe, and since their Rule demanded self-sufficiency, with it went the art of gardening.

Plan of St Gall - garden is in top left corner

One 9th century document, a plan by Abbot Hiato of St Gall, a monastery in Switzerland shows a blueprint for the perfect monastery and reveals the garden to be full of raised, rectangular beds in each of which was grown a single crop.  Monsativc gardens were made for utility and purpose - to provide plants to eat, from which to make medicines and to use in the everyday running of a monsatic establishment.  They were not for ornament and repose, and by the late 11th century, the monasteries were large, well established, and powerful

Exotic Secular

Virgin and Child with Saints, c.1510-1520. Attribution: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos.  GFDL Licence

As a sort of peace settled across Europe, with its return, so did garden making – but protected behind thick castle walls.   Such enclosed gardens were often called hortus conclusus and had a religious overtone referring to Mary.  However unlike monks, the nobility were neither celibate nor ascetic and many had seen the erotic, sensuous Moorish (Islamic) gardens in Spain, Sicily and on the Crusades.  Thus Islamic influences began to creep into the garden.

The Abbey House Garden, Malmesbury

The mediaeval garden mingled beauty with utility.  It was a place for relaxation, and in a malodorous world, a retreat full of sweetly scented plants.  Like the monasteries the plants were grown in raised beds, and many species still served medicinal or culinary uses, but they were grown in a way to make them look beautiful – a mix of species to create a floral tapestry.  Other beds were raised further to make seats, and carpeted with fine turf richly sprinkled with herbs such as thyme, camomile and other fragrant plants.  Alternatively the enclosed space was entirely covered in a ‘flowery mead’ - fine grass studded with many wild flowers.  

Favourite features

Boccaccio’s Teseida

Other popular features included arbours, the simplest being a structure of wooden  poles cloaked with climbers such as honeysuckle, vine or clematis.  More ornate frameworks were made from woven willow or wooden trellis.  This notion of a romantic retreat received a fillip with the story of fair Rosamund Clifford, mistress to the English king, Henry II.  In the grounds of Woodstock (now Blenheim Palace), the King built Rosamund a bower, where they had their trysts, until his jealous wife, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine learned of their trysts and killed her rival.
  

An Enclosed Garden

Ornate water features, especially tanks, baths, pools, and fountains were another favourite, as were mazes and labyrinths, often copied from patterns on Cathedral floors.  However these were not mazes as we know them – tall yew hedges - instead they were patterns cut into turf.

The Normans loved hunting, and they must have heard tales of the great Assyrian pairadaeza full of exotic animals, trees and flowers.  A ‘replica’ was built in 1123 by Henry I, who enclosed the park at Woodstock and stocked it with animals including lions, leopards, lynx, porcupine and camels. 

P.S.  The links of the above two images lead so some rather interesting, albeit not garden, facts.  Try them if you dare.