The Late Medieval garden And An Italian Renaissance garden

A NORTHERN RENAISSANCE GARDEN

This is a garden of a kind that Shakespeare would have known. It retains the medieval love of detail and enclosure but adds to it a Renaissance sense of order. The repetition of a series of identical enclosed geometric spaces is critical to evoking a type of layout which spread through France, Germany, the Low Countries and England from the 1580s onwards in response to the new ideas of the Italian Renaissance. Encompassed by a hedge of quickthom, the standard hedging plant of the age, it includes a hornbeam tunnel arbor (a medieval feature which lived on); a flower garden planted with flowers for seasonal color and evergreen topiary and hedging for year-round interest; and a potager divided into compartments containing vegetable beds, a small orchard and a herb garden.

The potager is a simplified version of the many garden patterns in the Dutch artist Vredemann de Vries's Hortorum Viridariorumque elegantes et multiplices formae... (Antwerp, 1583), which was influential throughout northern Europe. Its most distinctive feature is the woodwork which would give instant, unmistakeable period effect even though the capital outlay would be high. The Renaissance emphasis on symmetry and formality rules out any softening of hard contours by allowing plants to tumble over them, but there is ample room here for fruit trees, soft fruit, vegetables and herbs.

The flower garden is based on one of several designs in Salomon de Caus's Les Raisons des Forces Mouvantes (1615), combined with elements from one of Crispin de Passe's most famous engravings illustrated overleaf. While not complicated to maintain, this garden calls for patience, as the hedges and topiary require between five and eight years to mature — unless you use fully grown specimens.

The atmosphere of introspection is emphasized by the tunnel arbor — a medieval feature which retained its vitality into the 1680s — and another, inner wall or hedge, here of beech. Standard hollies stand at the comers and entrances, presenting a striking contrast in winter to the russet leaves of the beech. Squares and rectangles of smooth turf continue the medieval tradition of appreciating grass for its own special beauties, and form a containing band of restful areas of green, with cypresses acting as stately sentinels in the comers. The flowerbeds in the centre are edged with clipped box, and are filled with topiary and flowers which, to be correct, would be sparsely planted. I would cheat and make it denser, but avoid any suggestion of anachronistic bedding out.