Art of Gardening: Pliny and the Renaissance Garden

A garden in the sense in which we use it, a garden in its highest sense, is not a museum collection, nor a sort of pocket farm; it is a world made to our own measure. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Western man had to re-learn the art of gardening as well as much else.

No more than poems and pictures did gardens vanish entirely between the disintegration of Rome and the appearance of modern Europe, but gardening as a fine art virtually ceased to exist throughout the greater part of the Western world; and even the memory of what a great garden could be faded. We know something about medieval gardens from pictures in Books of Hours and from the rather stereotyped descriptions of poets; they had a distinct charm, but they were no great matter in extent or in aim. Men were too preoccupied with the survival of their bodies in this world and of their souls in the next to refine very much upon the art of living.

It is only in the last five centuries that gardening has acquired a history. The foundations upon which the Renaissance garden designer worked were physically Roman and spiritually Hellenistic. It has too often been said that the Church was the repository of all that was left of learning and skill when the great central structure of society went to wreck; so it was, and among much else it kept alive the tradition of plant growing, but plant growing is not gardening and the Church was never the mother of the new garden. The monastic garden with its vegetable patch, its orchard, and its herb garden for healing, was a dead end, because by the middle of the fifteenth century monasticism itself had become a dead end.

What Henry VIII slew in England was dying already, and even where the Reformation had least influence monastic life no longer absorbed so disproportionate a quantity of people or wealth as it had done.