The earliest gardens
were very practical affairs. Plants were valued as food, as
medicine and for their magical properties. The first step towards
gardening was the gathering of useful plants from the wild in order
to cultivate them in plots attached to dwellings.
There was almost
certainly nothing that we, if we were transported backwards in time
through the centuries, would have recognized as an ornamental
garden until the Roman Empire's administrators imported the
empire's architecture, building their villas around courtyards
planted for pleasure as well as usefulness, with evergreen leaves
and scented flowers around a pool or fountain. Their layout may
well have influenced the cloistered, courtyard structure of early
monasteries; and the fruit, vegetables, herbs and flowering plants
imported to Britain by the Romans were given their only chance of
survival by members of the religious orders in the relatively safe
environment of monastic orchards and walled gardens.
Manorial households
began to extend their outdoor territory. There was still a need for
protection from the hostile world outside, and gardens were either
walled or enclosed by impenetrable hedges or moats, some of which
have survived in whole or in part. Within these enclosures were
orchards and gardens of symmetrically laid out raised beds of
herbs, vegetables and flowers. Medieval gardens, from the
fourteenth century onwards, began to be used for pleasure and
leisure for the first time. Illuminated manuscripts show ladies and
their swains singing and playing lutes on flowery grass banks with
a background of trellised fences and arched arbours planted with
roses.
It is the buildings
surrounding a later garden, like the fifteenth-century chapel and
outbuildings at Sheldon Manor in Wiltshire, which conjure up a time
when the poem The Romance of the Rose, which Chaucer
translated from the French,.
Relative political
stability, security and prosperity under the Tudor dynasty
encouraged the rich and powerful to build increasingly magnificent
houses with elaborate gardens to match. The beneficiaries of the
Dissolution of the Monasteries used stone from the buildings that
were destroyed to build substantial family houses.
Sixteenth-century gardens were laid out in linked, symmetrical
enclosures for orchards, herb and vegetable gardens, and knots of
clipped hyssop, rue, thyme and santolina. The spaces within were
filled with flowers, herbs or, in the case of the more elaborate
designs, coloured gravel, crushed brick and coal dust. The knot
patterns were designed to be seen from above, either from upper
rooms m the house, from a raised walk or terrace, or from an
artificial mount which frequently gave views of the surrounding
countryside.
The art of topiary
which had been fashionable in Roman times was revived, and a
positive passion developed for clipping yew, box and other
evergreen shrubs into ever more elaborate and fantastical shapes. A
practice which continued until the eighteenth- century landscape
movement swept away the zoos, chess sets and other eccentric
topiary.
