The Garden Walls: French Gardens

Despite his tons of statuary and pictures and his troops of artists, he could do little more than the pathetic winner of one of the larger football pools whose only idea of luxury, having already a `telly' in the parlour, is to get a bigger one and put it in the kitchen as well. Mere enlargement is itself important, for the garden by its very size was forced to escape from the confinement of the castle walls and spread over the surrounding countryside. Yet still the French distaste for dwelling in a large unfortified open space died hard. While the Italians were forgetting as quickly as possible that they had ever lived in castles and were building spacious country villas with great welcoming entrance courts, hospitable quotations carved over the gate, and gardens which led out to the world beyond, the French were still bedeviled by the habit of seclusion, and though their gardens were now beyond the walls and beyond the moat, they continued to produce the comforting illusion that they were not. The progress is clearly marked. There was not much scope for garden development on the limited site of Charles's private chateau at Amboise, but Louis XII, who succeeded him, preferred Blois and extended the gardens there. The chateau at Blois was traditional, an accretion of medieval buildings upon a Roman site; as the moat did not surround the new pleasure grounds it was soon allowed to dry out, but each of the four principal rectangular units was bounded by walls and in the main garden a trellised gallery was added, giving exactly the effect of a monastic cloister or a Roman peristyle, a covered circumference walk from which one could look only one way . . . inward. A walled garden with its air of mysterious seclusion and other-worldliness can perform its miracle upon one condition: that it does not become too big. But if you indulge in aristocratic competitive display size becomes essential, particularly if you are French. Thus the walled garden, like the megalosaurus, became so large it lost its point.