The Potentialities of Garden Material: Pliny and the Renaissance Garden

Throughout the whole area there were marble seats `which serve for relief when one is tired of walking' and beside the seats there were fountains. All this is very unlike the public gardens of Greece or the semi-public gardens of the Greek philosophers; the form is there, but it is animated now by a very different spirit; Pliny makes no pretence of being a Greek philosopher himself; he does not specify discourse on the higher ethics as he walks beneath the planes, indeed he does not even presuppose the company of a friend; when he sups by the marble basin there is no suggestion that he does not sup there alone; he is, in fact, no longer playing at being a Greek, but quite simply living and enjoying himself as a Roman gentleman of great means at that period naturally would. Even his taste has lost much of the superficial Greek flavour; there is more verdure in this Tuscan hippodrome than one ever senses to have been present in a Greek gymnasium; most notable of all, where are the statues? Without statues and urns much of the atmosphere of the classic sacred grove has gone; only once in all his correspondence does Pliny refer to a statue and then it is to an ancient bronze of an emaciated old man which he acquired and presented to the township of his birth at Como. In the place of statuary we find what? Topiary. The art of the tree barber was first practiced by Cnaius Martius, a friend of Augustus, and there is no sign of it before Imperial times. It was evidently not sufficiently far advanced or sufficiently fashionable for the trompes l'oeil of Pompeii to give us any examples of it; in fact, it is very likely that at the time of Pliny's Tuscan villa the craft was enjoying its first excessive heyday. Amusing though topiary often is, the naval battles in box; the hunt in full cry, hounds, horsemen, and all; the name of the estate owner and even of the topiarist in carefully trimmed evergreen: these were not garden features likely to commend themselves to an Attic palate. But, apart from the value of topiary as a novelty and an amusement, and its more real value as bridging the gap between architecture and verdure, its arrival was a sign of a much greater awareness of the potentialities of garden material than ever before. Where until now is there any record of the judicious relationship of foliage as in Pliny's hippodrome? Where the calculated interplay of sunlight and gloom?