Garden Irrigation: The Garden of Euphues

In ancient Egypt it was the pattern of irrigation that gave rise to the chequer-board gardens of the type of the garden of Thebes. In the Netherlands the gardens were as rigidly squared off as they were in the Nile Valley. Writing of the principles which ought to underlie the making of gardens in the Italian Renaissance, Ammanati asserted that `what is planted should always reflect the shape of what is built'; but in the Netherlands all garden shapes paralleled the waterways. The frequency of canals in Holland to some extent influenced the development of the French canal garden. It would be odd if it were not so. The steps by which the French moat turned into ornamental water can be traced, but that does not mean that the direction of the steps and the speed of the development did not owe something to the presence of canal-girt gardens on France's north-eastern border. Yet the effect of canals was very different in the two lands. In France their length and relative narrowness served to accentuate the vista; the eye traversed the long diminishing reaches to the horizon. Very often the canal was in the main axis of house and garden; standing in the principal room in the centre of the garden front one looked across parterres flanked by bosquets down the greater length of the water path. Obviously this was possible only when the canal was ornamental and finite; to obtain a direct perspective view down the canals of Holland requires that the house be built in midstream or at one of the rare changes of direction in the water. The great majority of Dutch gardens have a canal to one side; the water is only ornamental as a road is ornamental, fortuitously; the primary purpose of a canal in Holland is drainage, its secondary function is as a means of communication, its third characteristic is that it is an obstacle. Once the French had straightened out their moats and run them down the centre seam of their symmetric gardens, none of those aspects was true for them.