Flavour of Gardens: The Garden of Euphues

The French are extremists; when they discovered the idea of symmetry they exploited it to its limit, even as under Louis XIV they exploited the idea of monarchy, and a century later exploited to extremes the concept of revolution. The English character shrinks from extremes, prefers not to carry anything to its `logical' conclusion, and approaches problems empirically. Consequently English gardens give the impression of piecemeal growth, even when as at Nonsuch and Hampton Court they might, in fact, have been the result of a single act of creation. All the great sixteenth-century gardens of England incorporated Renaissance features, but none of them, not even the most elaborate, was conceived as a whole. A succession of parts, attractive in themselves, was laid out as the ground dictated, but the interrelationship of the parts was left to take care of itself. It follows from this method, or lack of method, that no result could be achieved that required concerted effort. Ceremonial magnificence, which is essentially the product of calculated order, was out of reach. The flavour of these gardens despite their considerable size seems to have been carefree and frivolous; they pleased the fancy rather than the imagination. The Renaissance notion of a unified garden plan first appears in England in Bacon's ideal garden (1597). This is a transition garden, no longer medieval, but not yet quite emancipated from medievalism; it is really a literary garden in that it has a nostalgic dream quality and none of the quality of drama which a romantic garden must have to earn its name.