Knot Gardens: French Gardens

There are two principal sources of the divided bed, the streams from which combined to form the `knot'. When the medieval garden was divided and subdivided into a great number of rectangles it became the custom, influenced in part by the plants grown there and in part merely by a wish for variety, to subdivide each rectangle in a different way. This provided an amusing test for the designer's ingenuity. It was done not only in Italy and France but throughout Europe. In England it was common practice to outline the beds with thyme, hyssop, thrift, or later with box. Gradually the line of the division became more important than the spaces contained and the curious intertwinings of these little hedges took place which by 1500 were known as `knots'. These knot gardens left very little room for plants inside the partitions and those growing there had an unmannerly way of encroaching on the pattern; so the flower beds came to have no flowers : the frame developed so much intricacy that the picture was left out. In place of primroses, violets, roses, lilies, marigolds, and columbines, the pattern was filled with different-coloured earths and sands. By the seventeenth century even the plants that outlined the pattern were often expelled, because they would regrettably grow and blur the clean line of the gardener's ingenuity; in place of thrift and box, lead strips, sometimes plain, sometimes cut like tiny battlements, were used, or oak boards, or the shank bones of sheep, or pebbles. Bacon was strong against this perversion of the garden bed: `As for the making of knots or figures with diverse coloured earths' they be but toys, you may see as good sights many times in tarts.' But there is another source for the knot garden and a far older one than the elaboration of flower beds. These patterns may be seen on tarts, but they were not always toys. Their history is nearly as old as man's own. The practice of weaving intricate patterns on the ground has links with the Minotaur, with Troy, with ancient Egypt, and with Neolithic man. It is probable enough, and easy to understand, that a labyrinth made of insurmountable walls should develop out of a natural tendency to elaborate defenses.