Garden of Dampierre: French Gardens

As each garden was self- centered and one could not see beyond it, there was no visual reason why the separate gardens should be co-ordinated into one harmonious whole and there were usually compelling practical reasons of site why they should not. There is as yet no notion at all of designing a garden as a unit or of relating that unit to the house. The gardens at Blois were upon different levels, but no real advantage was taken of it; the great terraces were not visibly interconnected; Bramante's stairways had not yet created the architect's garden. All that Blois owed to Italy were the horticultural skill of a Neapolitan priest, Pacello da Mercogliano, and a magnificent marble fountain. The circumscribing trellised walk persisted for some time, and while it did so the medieval garden in essentials remained, but once it was accepted that the protective arm of the wall could be replaced by a moat a great step forward had been taken, because with a canal boundary you may be limited in body but your eye is free to look outward. A fine transitional example is the garden of Dampierre. Like most French gardens of this period we can know it only from the engravings of Androuet du Cerceau. Here the entire garden area is walled, but within that area the principal garden is moated quite independently of the chateau. Most interesting is the second unattached canal running parallel to one side of the main garden. This canal no longer has even the pretence of a defensive function, as its ends are quite open. The moat is now on the way to becoming a merely decorative canal. None of the series of great sixteenth-century gardens illustrated by du Cerceau now survive in anything like their original condition, but at Villandry in Touraine an elaborate reconstruction gives more of the true aspect of the original than could any overgrown, half-ruined survival that had preserved continuity of plan. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had completely eliminated the earlier layout here and, true to the nature of the times, had filled in the moat and replaced it with terraces.