Growth of Gardens in Size: Pliny and the Renaissance Garden

The first direct effect of a peaceful countryside was to allow the garden to escape confinement. The fortress began to soften into the villa in Italy before anywhere else and the first consequence of the garden escaping its bounds was that it grew in size. Up to a very late date, indeed until long after the sophisticated developments of the cinquecento had become part of the accepted formula for garden design, we come across instances of famous gardens which in conception are really little more than the medieval chessboard blown up in size and multiplied in sub-units until acres of ground were covered by rectangular beds and their parallel service paths. The medieval garden plan has never quite disappeared. The peculiar nature of the Renaissance was the discovery of an astonishing past by men of abounding creative energy. Ancient thought, ancient literature, ancient statuary and architecture all became uncovered in the course of one generation. But the gardens of the great Imperial days were erased long before the fifteenth century and could not be recovered. There were no traces but a few broken and buried statues, an unmeaning wall, or a subterranean garden room, so that it was from the remains of ancient literature that the Renaissance had to obtain its notions of a classic garden. We know more about the gardens of the ancient world now than the fifteenth century did. Not only are the literary sources available to us greater but certain physical remains have since been recovered which were unsuspected then. The eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79 preserved many features of Hellenistic life like flies in amber. Within a few hours the life of two cities, Pompeii and Herculaneum, was bound into a statuesque rigidity not to be disturbed for 1,700 years. The gardens preserved at Pompeii occupied much the same place in the life of the times as did, say, the gardens at Bath in 1790 or at Brighton thirty years later or at Kensington today.