Medieval European garden: Pliny and the Renaissance Garden

Where land was restricted by defensive walls or moats little could be spared for castle gardens, and similar controls limited the garden both at the town house of the wealthy merchant and at the monastery. The little space available was divided into separate beds for each sort of herb grown. As there were many different herbs both for cooking and healing, the resulting garden was a chequer-board of small rectangular beds divided by narrow paths. Given as a starting-point this sort of garden which had remained fairly static for nearly a thousand years, one naturally asks what galvanized it into life and why should this life have first pulsed in Italy rather than anywhere else in Europe where the medieval pattern was not dissimilar? All art is a luxury in the sense that it is a by-product of necessity; its creation is impossible without an excess of energy and an excess of time. So first amongst the reasons of its growth was the great commercial wealth of Italy which gave men a taste for display; and second was the relative tranquility of that country (compared with the rest of Europe) which gave men lei-sure. Something of these conditions could have been paralleled in the Low Countries, but in one respect Italy excelled all other lands the physical remnants of the great past were thicker upon the ground there than anywhere else. The medieval European garden was essentially a sanctuary, a place enclosed, but it contained within itself the seed of an unlimited growth outward. This seed was the mount. The garden mount is mysterious; it has not one origin but many. It can rarely have been a thing of beauty, but it has a long history. The ancient mountain races, Hittite, Mede and Persian, descending in turn upon the alluvial plain of the Euphrates Valley, brought with them not only the custom of worshipping their gods upon high places but also a nostalgic longing for the hills. There is a story that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were built by Nebuchadnezzar for his Median wife, who pined for the uplands of her youth. The tale is symbolic of the longing of the mountain races for a touch of their home scenery. But the famous Hanging Gardens which the Greeks attributed not to Nebuchadnezzar but to the semi-mythical queen Semiramis were not an isolated phenomenon.