Ornamental Garden Structures: Pliny and the Renaissance Garden

But though gardens were principally for use, they were also enjoyed, and some of the more elaborate ones developed features which were purely ornamental. For example, the source of water so necessary to the gardener was best placed for obvious practical reasons in the centre of the garden; very early it became an ornamental fountain or well-head to which the garden beds bore a regular geometrical relationship. This was not merely for convenience, but because the regularity, the orderly repetition, pleased the eye as a rhyme pleases the ear. In order to keep off poultry and dogs it became the custom to fence the borders; these fences became decorative trellis-work destined to evolve one day into stone balustrading. The supporting structure for vines or top-heavy shrubs was the original nucleus of the arbor or bower, but the resulting shade and privacy was thought to be so delightful that arbors were soon constructed for their own sakes. Step by step the `vocabulary' of the gardener-working-as-an-artist grew up out of the practice of the gardener-working-as-a-craftsman, while at the same time society was arriving at a state which permitted the art itself to flower. The plan of these gardens was rectangular. In countries such as Egypt where the ground is irrigated by canals the division of cultivation into small rectangles arises naturally, but when water is carried by hand from a well or pond a radial development leading to a circular garden and trapezium-shaped beds is more logical. But that it was the influence of ruined buildings rather than of irrigation that was the principal factor in squaring off European gardens is evident from the frequency in medieval illustration of circular gardens when control is not present; more often than not the garden of Eden is represented as a small circle of ground surrounded by a paling fence and containing two trees, one snake, and two disconsolate human beings who would appear to have had little to lose. These circular gardens are clearly based on the plot of cultivation with which the peasant surrounded his hut; they had no controlling architectural foundation to link them to an earlier and more civilized age. Later, sophisticated circular gardens occurred and the earliest European botanic garden, founded at Padua in 1545, was laid out on a radial principle. Scale was also of great importance in determining the character of medieval gardens.