Small Scale Garden: The Garden of Euphues

Far from being under French influence, no country more desperately opposed it. Yet despite their differences Dutch and Flemish gardens have one important thing in common: they are normally on a smaller scale than the French. The strength of Flanders in the Middle Ages lay in its vigorous democratic town life rather than in an aristocracy seated among towers and battlements. The gardens of about 1600 are those of rising burghers, not of decaying barons; they are urban and suburban in character. It is, perhaps, a matter of emphasis; in the nature of things there could be no Amboise, Blois or Fontainebleau, and lacking these the records that remain to us are of town gardens. Paris also had its town gardens, but it is not surprising if, with the Tuileries and St. Germain on the doorstep, the ornamental backyards of merchants should have mostly escaped record. Had we equally good pictures of French town gardens, it might appear that a sixteenth-century garden at Amiens or Tours was much like one at Ghent or Bruges. Later, when Le Notre was the fashion, we do know that the small town garden in Paris was usually completely occupied by a compartiment de broderie. The great man was asked to produce designs and he did so, but they might just as well have been the designs of Boyceau or the Mollets or any talented embroiderer. Somewhere about the middle of the seventeenth century there occurred a break between the sophisticated French attitude to the small garden and that of the rest of Europe. No one could suppose the embroidery parterre of the French a pleasant place for a stroll, or a pleasance in which the owner could entertain his friends or idle away a sunny hour by himself. Its only purpose was to be seen from the upstair windows, to look neat and trim and elegant and expensive. The only person who ever needed to set foot in the French town garden was the gardener and the only tool he needed was a broom. But the strange small Flemish gardens illustrated by Vredeman de Vries lack such a logical basis. They still consist chiefly of ground patterns which could most fully be seen from above, but unlike the French parterres they are not the sort of patterns that are intended to be enjoyed visually as pictures; they have a vertical existence as well; there are trees and arbours and covered trellis walks which interfere with the view from the windows and indicate a garden to walk in, to sit in, to play in and to make love in.