Lake Water Gardens: Garden Design in the Americas

Although it is clear no great areas could be cultivated in this way, some of the Chinampas were quite large, as much as two or three hundred feet in length with soil up to four feet deep. Small trees were grown on the largest of them and they were stable enough to sustain a gardener's hut.' The ornamental character of these gardens was due to chance and was always subordinate to their practical function as a source of vegetables and flowers. Roses were as much a crop as lentils to a people whose religious customs demanded not only human blood but garlands of flowers in staggering quantities. Vegetable, fruit and flowers were intensively and indiscriminately cultivated on the Chinampas in much the same way as they were in the walled gardens of eighteenth-century Britain. Although these gardens were peculiar in that the breezes blew them gently across the water and that their owners could tow them by canoe or pole them like punts, they are really in plan no more than the typical protected garden of a society still insecure. The lake water of Tezcuco fulfilled the same purpose as the moats around chateaux in fifteenth-century France or the walls about the castles of England. When the Spaniards came the capital of the Aztec Empire had passed beyond the need of such gardens. What the conquistadores saw were survivals which owed their continuance to their magnificent fertility and to the fact that in the periodic inundations they were never flooded because they floated up with the floods. Even had there been no invasion they would probably not have continued much longer. The Aztecs themselves were already taking steps to drain the feeder lakes that supplied Tezcuco, and the Spaniards completed the task. By the end of the eighteenth century most of the Mexican lakeland had been dried into a leprous-looking landscape of saline flats among which the stranded islands had rooted themselves to the ground. Only half-filled ditches or gutters of water remained to show where the lake had been.