LANDSCAPE DESIGN IN THE WESTERN WORLD – OR THE LACK OF IT – DURING THE MIDDLE AGES
Robin Schachat
Now we emerge from the heyday of culture and landscape design during the “Dark” and Middle Ages, in Andalusia, to discuss what was happening in the rest of Europe. Let’s begin with the Roman Empire, briefly, and go from there.
Many of us have toured the Roman Forum, which maintains the same form it had when Cicero spoke on the steps outside the Senate, and have seen that open public spaces were a significant part of Roman life. Fora in general, the Coliseum, the Baths of Caracalla, the Theatre of Pompey and the like were central meeting places whose origins can the traced to the agoras and theaters of ancient Greece.
The great Roman impact on public space was in building towns and cities as the centers of life for what had been agrarian peoples, as Roman armies advanced north from Rome. In other cities of the Roman Republic, spaces like amphitheaters, baths, and fora were replicated as the centers for public activity. But gardens, as we know them, were not incorporated into such spaces; architecture was the primary driver in landscape design, emphasizing open spaces, walls, and meeting spaces. The influence of the Empire carried this model throughout Western Europe as the Roman armies – themselves often made up of citizens from the newly conquered communities, under the leadership of Roman generals – adopted Roman styles of town and city planning.
For an insight into the gardens of individual villas of wealthy Roman leaders, we are lucky to have the extensive documents of Pliny the Elder (23-79), a great proponent of natural history. Pliny’s work shows that horticultural concerns at the time were based in agricultural development, and landscape design was structured entirely around agricultural interests of those wealthy enough to maintain lands and plantings.
One small incursion of ancient Middle Eastern style occurred early in the fourth century. In 306 the emperor Constantius died in Eboracum, now the city of York in England. He was succeeded by his son Constantine (later, the Great), who drove back various Gallic and Germanic invaders and in the year 324 reunited all areas of Roman influence under his own leadership from the ancient Greek city of Byzantium, renamed Constantinople (now Istanbul). Although Constantinople was founded on a Greek base and according to a Roman formula, a few aspects of landscape design sneaked into the Roman model from neighboring Persian lands, notable among them the concept of the char bagh or quartered Paradise Garden. This was adapted, interestingly, by way of the Christian peoples who adopted that symbology as their religion spread from the Middle East westward. Byzantine gardens began to include fresco-painted or otherwise embellished walls as well. It is not certain whether Constantine adopted the Christian religion in childhood from his mother or later in life, but certainly some aspects of Christian symbology, with roots in earlier Persian symbology, found homes in the design of in his capital city.
When the city of Rome was first sacked by Alaric and the Visigoths in 410, central control of greater Europe began to dissolve quickly. Many peoples – Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks, Celts, Angles, Saxons, Lombards, Picts and more – established separate areas of influence. But the Roman structure of towns built around public meeting and market spaces remained. The private villas of wealthy Roman citizens crumbled. And wealth that had previously flowed to Rome and to the Empire slowly but inexorably began its flow to Rome and to the Catholic Church.
By the year 800, the Church had developed such strength that it was Pope Leo III who crowned the next emperor (after many centuries’ hiatus) Charlemagne (742-814), erstwhile King of the Franks. A single copy remains of Capitulare de villis vel curtis imperii, an inventory of the plants grown in his imperial gardens. Three of the approximately one hundred plants listed were apparently grown for the beauty of their flowers: the Madonna lily (a symbol of chastity), the Italian gladiolus, and dog rose (a symbol of the Virgin Mary). The remaining listed plants are food and medicinal plants and orchard trees. Clearly the emphasis is on food production, not on pleasure gardens.
This same time marked the early years of the feudal system, wherein kings granted use of lands to the church and to barons, barons granted use of the land to their knights, and knights granted land to peasants; at each step dues were paid to next landholder up the ladder, all leading back to the king – except in the case of lands granted to the church, the income from which redounded to the church. Needless to say, few were enriched but the kings and the church. And gardens built for pleasure were a perquisite of the wealthy.
Here begins the era of the great monasteries in Europe, which became the centers for wealth and, to a large extent, commerce during the Middle Ages in non-Andalusian Europe. Monasteries were built around the lives of the monks who resided in them, and were unlike the subsistence farms of lesser citizens. Catholic monks, especially those in the largest orders, lived in relative wealth and comfort. Their monasteries included not only agricultural kitchen gardens, but also medicinal gardens, not only open courtyards but also enclosed cloisters, not only churches, but in a few cases special contemplative gardens as well. And, of course, vineyards.
Plan drawings still exist for a Benedictine monastery that was never built in the early ninth century; these are known as The Plan of St. Gall. They may represent an early plan for a later monastery built on the island of Reichenau in southern Germany. The plan clearly shows a quartered cloister garden as well as planned orchards, an infirmary with garden, and food production gardens to be worked by lay people outside of the inner monastery walls.
Incidentally, it was St. Gall himself (ca. 550-646) who defined the word “pleasaunce” as an open space or courtyard within a monastery, in which flowers were grown to decorate the church. In later usage, a pleasaunce comes to mean a large pleasure garden or park, usually privately held.
The ruins of one magnificent example of a medieval Cistercian monastery still stand today at Fountains Abbey, near Ripon in Yorkshire. Fountains Abbey was founded in 1132 by a small group of Benedictine monks who had grown dissatisfied by what they considered the dissolute ways of their order, and despite attacks from Scots toward the north and a period of great loss due to the Black Death (bubonic plague), flourished until the dissolution of the monasteries under the reign of Henry VIII in 1539. Yet even in such a wealthy community, non-functional gardens had no major role. As is shown by this map of Fountains Abbey, the only featured garden location is the cloister. Medieval abbey cloisters were an area accessible only to the monks, and were an area of retreat. Unlike the other gardens of the abbey, they did not serve as areas of food or herb production; their purpose was to aid in contemplation. Typically they were quartered gardens centered on a well, fountain, or fish pond (in these cases, the fish were in fact also raised as a food source). Such a cloister garth, or viridarium, is clearly based on the Persian Paradise Garden model.
Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire
Fountains Abbey ground plan
Twentieth Century imagining of a Cloister Garth or viridarium
Archaeological study shows that production gardens at Fountains Abbey were surrounded by wattle fencing. Wattle fences surrounding raised beds were first known to have been recommended by the first century Roman agriculturist Columella, whose studies of farming techniques were to be found in European monastery libraries of the middle ages. Such wattle fencing is commonly reproduced in “modern” medieval gardens today.
Indeed, we learn much of what we know of medieval gardens from reproductions of such gardens available around the world. There are some beauties, notably at The Cloisters in New York, at Queen Eleanor’s Garden at Winchester Castle in Britain, and at Bazoges en Pareds, France. Sadly, modern interpretations of the medieval garden tend to be corrupted by Renaissance garden characteristics and even occasionally by incursions of Moorish garden style, so they cannot be relied upon as truly accurate representations.
The Cloisters, New York
Winchester Castle, Britain
Bazoges en Pareds, France
There are very few remaining period depictions of gardens from Europe of the Middle Ages. Only two gardens are seen frequently in medieval art: Gethsemane and Eden. Art of these does not reflect existing gardens, but imaginary ones. We must take our guidance for the appearance of medieval gardens from writings about monastic life and, most especially in the later centuries, the life of nobles whose wealth and power accumulated as feudal systems enriched them.
One useful source in considering the lives of wealthy nobles is a number of Books of Hours which remain in museums and libraries. A Book of Hours is a book of daily prayers, sometimes including additional prayers or contemplations, usually liberally illuminated with paintings, prepared for personal use by a member of the laity. These begin to be seen during the 1200’s. Clearly only the wealthiest private citizens could afford to have Books of Hours created for their use, and they often favored illustrations that reflected their belongings, activities, or ways of life. Notable illuminations that depict “gardens” tended still, even in the late medieval period, to stress agricultural pursuits rather than pleasure gardens, even though other pursuits of pleasure are often depicted in Books of Hours.
Illustrations from Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, a Book of Hours ca. 1412
Manor houses and castles of such wealthy citizens benefited from walls and protection from both animal and human marauders, hence their lands became better developed and more valuable as the centuries progressed. Later in the Middle Ages we find evidence of private pleasure spaces appearing within their walls. Depictions of these are occasionally to be found, translated as religious scenes, as for example pictures of the Virgin Mary seated in a garden full of flowers.
Within those walls, in the later Middle Ages, some very wealthy nobles also kept menageries or bestiaries, small private zoos. The most famous depiction of one of these is, of course, apocryphal: “The Unicorn in Captivity”. But it is important to note the background of this magnificent tapestry, which is carpeted with flowers. Each flower depicted has an important Christian symbolism. Backgrounds like this are the standard in the greatest medieval tapestries, as for example the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries at the Musee National du Moyen Age in Paris. They are also the standard for many illuminations in religious books of the period. Sadly, they do not represent many actual gardens. Turfgrass in gardens (in which wildflowers were commonly mingled) was first discussed as an option by Albertus Magnus in his De Vigitabilibus, written in the mid-thirteenth century. Grass seats and grass courts for playing outdoor games began to appear soon after, but flowery turfs in gardens were a creature primarily of the Renaissance.
“The Unicorn in Captivity”
Unicorn tapestries at the Musee National du Moyen Age in Paris
“Turf Seat as shown in Les Grandes Heures", the Book of Hours of Anne of Brittany, 1505
Renaissance gardens exploded onto the scene in Italy during the fourteenth century and spread from there across northern Europe. That explosion will wait for our next article.