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History of Garden Art

gardens, little lawns, fountains, streams, and antique statues; there is a park for medicinal
herbs and a fruit-garden, both of which are larger than the Bois de Vincennes; there are
vineyards, a deer park with a well large enough to supply the whole town, and grottoes—
the finest the poet ever saw. We have to take great pains to be able to reconstruct this
garden. The actual flower-gardens here, as elsewhere, must have been very small; but
there is no doubt that Alfonso was a real friend to plants and flowers, for we are told that
when he fled on the approach of Charles in 1495 he found time to take with him to his
place of exile in Sicily "toutes sortes de grain pour faire jardins."

Jacob Burckhardt shows more botanical than architectural interest in descriptions of
gardens of the early Renaissance. No doubt the ground-plan was simple, but we must
partly blame a certain want of skill in the writer; for when later on a real artist like Cardinal
Bembo gives us a charming garden picture, we are able to trace a scheme that is regular
despite its simplicity. In the last years of the fifteenth century a young Venetian, at that
time living at the court at Ferrara, published his lovers' dialogue in the garden of Asolo
(Gli Asolani) at the friendly court of Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus. Bembo's
description is poetry, of course; but it shows character and individuality, and is un-
doubtedly a faithful account of the garden at Asolo. He says that on the occasion of a
wedding feast for one of the court ladies, a little group of the party left the others at
their midday sleep, and went out in the garden which was in front of the dining-hall.

This charming garden was of wondrous beauty. On both sides of a pergola of vines, traversing the
garden in the form of a cross, wide and shady, there ran to right and left two similar paths. They were
long and wide and strewn with bright gravel. On the garden side, they were shut in, beyond where the
pergola began, by hedges of thick yew. This yew reached breast-high, so that one could lean against it and
get a wide view of all parts of the place. On the other side tall laurels stood along the wall, pointing up-
ward, but with their tops forming the arch of a half-hoop above the path, and closely clipped so that not a
single leaf ventured to push out of its proper place; and outside the walls nobody at all could be seen. On
one side of the garden at the end there were two windows framed in white marble: the walls here were very
thick, and from either side one could sit and look from above over the plain. On this path strolled fair
ladies, accompanied by youths, and protected from the sun. Admiring this and that, and chatting as
they walked, they came to a little meadow at the end of the garden, full of freshly-cut grass, and scattered
over with flowers; at the far end were two clumps of laurels placed irregularly and in great numbers, looking
very quiet and venerable, and full of shade. Between them there was room for a very lovely stream,
cleverly hollowed out from the living rock, which was the termination of the garden on this side. From
it poured currents of fresh cold water, starting from the hill, not springing out high above the
ground, and falling into a marble canal that cut through the middle of the meadow and then ran rippling
through the garden.

The middle of the garden was marked by a pergola forming a cross, a constant con-
stituent of a garden for hundreds of years, in the seventeenth century exactly the same
as when Boccaccio knew it. But here water suffers completely new treatment: the fountain
is no longer the chief feature as in mediaeval times, its place being taken by the grotto.
This receives the stream from the rock at the end of the garden, which is cut in two at
the back by a canal. Unfortunately Bembo does not describe any further irrigation, nor
are we told anything about the planting of the four corners framed by the hedge. Perhaps
there would be little fountains and clipped box, perhaps fruit-trees planted round. But
there is a careful gradation to be seen in the whole picture, from the painstaking arrange-
ment of the front near the house to the careless disposition of the trees at the back, where
the rock ends it all; and even the "selvatici" that are not enclosed are symmetrically and
conventionally placed—grottoes and canal, and masses of trees grouped in clumps. In