Enclosed and Secured Gardens: Pliny and the Renaissance Garden

They were urban, not suburban, and they belonged to the leisured classes. They were certainly enclosures, in size and essential nature very like what we would call a yard today, but they were yards transmuted into sanctuaries. By the employment of special skills, not by the working of chance but of intent, they were given a spiritual as well as a material existence. Architecturally they were open-air rooms. Spiritually they were harbours, sheltered from sun, wind, and the noise and dust of the streets. The buildings of Pompeii were broadly on the Greek pattern. Greek town houses were built flush to the street on which they turned almost windowless faces. Architectural adornment was reserved for the internal face of the houses, each of which was usually constructed around an open square. Most houses therefore contained within themselves a space open to the sky but insulated from the outside world. Around these squares were built colonnades, shady passages on to which the living-rooms of the house opened rather than on to the dusty street. The colonnades and the space they enclosed are the peristyle. Peristyles were usually small because of the constricted development of towns and the high value of urban land. The garden had to be made in the peristyle, for there was generally no other space available. The ingredients of such a garden were not a matter of chance, but were indicated by the traditional practice of many hundreds of years, a practice which had itself been based upon immemorial need. What that practice was and what those needs had been were a part of the national inheritance which in turn reached back to days of primitive savagery. One primitive source of gardens was the rough enclosure of thorn with which man the hunter protected himself and his family from wild beasts while he slept. This enclosure grew in the course of ages into a fortress or a castle, but it also became a garden. Man as a herdsman reached a similar point for different reasons; his en-closure was to protect himself from the trampling of his own herds. In either case the homestead, whether hut or cave, needed water and shade so that both spring and tree were included within the protective belt. For countless generations these enclosures were associated in the human mind with safety from enemies, shade from the sun, refreshment after hunger and thirst, coolness after heat, love after fear, and sleep after exhaustion.