Gardening is a Fine Art: Pliny and the Renaissance Garden

Running water is desirable, and it is better if it springs up unexpectedly in some grotto which has been decorated with coloured shells. Laurel, yew, and cypresses linked with ivy are commended, but fruit trees must be kept separate in the kitchen garden. Comic statues are admitted. Circles and semicircles, which in architectural features such as courts are very fine, should be echoed in the garden. This is not merely a reproduction of Pliny, although almost everything of which Pliny wrote is here. The prescription is a mélange of classical and medieval. The eminence with its emphasis on the view and the ease of the ascent is pure Pliny, as are the trees girt with ivy. The portico, too, is classical, so are the tufa and shell grottoes, but the pergola is traditional and almost as old as man's cultivation of the vine. The decorative pots are traditional, but the name in box comes straight from Pliny's Tuscan villa garden. It is easy to jump to the conclusion that the topiary Alberti recommends derives only from Pliny's letters, but probably the craft of tree-barbering persisted in some form throughout the Middle Ages. There is an account of the Villa Quaracchi as early as 1459 which describes centaurs, ships, galleys, temples, arrows, men, women, popes, cardinals, and dragons, all in a fine improbable distribution of sculptured leafage. Apart from the time needed to acquire the technique, such arboreal set pieces take many years to mature, which suggests that the craft may never have been for-gotten. One recognizes also a sort of concord between topiary and the medieval fancy for grotesque gargoyles; and there is perhaps another relationship between the patient care taken to perfect such elaborate pieces and the long years of monastic seclusion. But we are not to look among the ingredients and furnishing for what made the early Renaissance garden different. There are three much more deep-rooted indications that gardening is again becoming a fine art.