DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.16633#0045
26
History of Garden Art
FIG. 373. A LITTLE GARDEN OF PARADISE—A DESIGN FOR A SCHOOL GARDEN
welfare of his native town, and thought out a careful social scheme which was very far m
advance of his time, and has only nowadays pressed into the circle of modern interests.
For not only did he plan school buildings, where seats and tables were carefully designed
for the children's health, but he wished to have a school garden in front, which he named
the "little garden of Paradise" (Fig. 373), "so as to awaken good thoughts in the children,
of walking in Paradise, and so practising them in the Christian religion and other good,
useful and honourable studies." Thither the teachers were to take their scholars, and there
a public examination was to be held. As a room for trials, he designed a large domed place
in the middle of the garden, with four chairs in it, where there should be children, boys
and girls together, holding their little disputations, and on the walls there were to be
hung up the things they had made. Four doors led into the quarters of a large garden
square that was traversed by wide walks, and these divisions were cut up by little arboured
paths into four flower-gardens, where the young examinees were allowed to gather the
flowers in the beds as a reward; in the middle was a large fountain. In the first section
there was a model of Adam and Eve, with the mother of mankind plucking an apple from
a real tree of Paradise and offering it to her spouse. Below this group the children could
read the words, cut in stone:
Through Adam's fall, on garden ground,
Mankind, alas, his ruin found.
But consolation was at hand in the garden section on the right, where on a "very charming
mound in the middle there was a figure carved in stone of Our Lord and Only Saviour
Jesus Christ rising out of his grave in the garden," with the following inscription below:
In garden ground, where Christ lay dead,
Mankind is now delivered.
When there was to be no examination, the children were to run about in the garden, and
History of Garden Art
FIG. 373. A LITTLE GARDEN OF PARADISE—A DESIGN FOR A SCHOOL GARDEN
welfare of his native town, and thought out a careful social scheme which was very far m
advance of his time, and has only nowadays pressed into the circle of modern interests.
For not only did he plan school buildings, where seats and tables were carefully designed
for the children's health, but he wished to have a school garden in front, which he named
the "little garden of Paradise" (Fig. 373), "so as to awaken good thoughts in the children,
of walking in Paradise, and so practising them in the Christian religion and other good,
useful and honourable studies." Thither the teachers were to take their scholars, and there
a public examination was to be held. As a room for trials, he designed a large domed place
in the middle of the garden, with four chairs in it, where there should be children, boys
and girls together, holding their little disputations, and on the walls there were to be
hung up the things they had made. Four doors led into the quarters of a large garden
square that was traversed by wide walks, and these divisions were cut up by little arboured
paths into four flower-gardens, where the young examinees were allowed to gather the
flowers in the beds as a reward; in the middle was a large fountain. In the first section
there was a model of Adam and Eve, with the mother of mankind plucking an apple from
a real tree of Paradise and offering it to her spouse. Below this group the children could
read the words, cut in stone:
Through Adam's fall, on garden ground,
Mankind, alas, his ruin found.
But consolation was at hand in the garden section on the right, where on a "very charming
mound in the middle there was a figure carved in stone of Our Lord and Only Saviour
Jesus Christ rising out of his grave in the garden," with the following inscription below:
In garden ground, where Christ lay dead,
Mankind is now delivered.
When there was to be no examination, the children were to run about in the garden, and