Plants Of The Water Garden

THE FORMAL WATER GARDEN

When the Renaissance, starting in Italy in the fifteenth century, set Europe free from the stifling clericalism of the medieval period, its architects and artists went back to the Classical principles of ancient Greece and Rome. And, because most garden designers of the Renaissance were actually architects, garden design underwent the same vast change.

As the twentieth-century garden designer  (and architect) Sir Geoffrey jellicoe explained: The saga of the Italian garden is richer and more varied than any other garden culture, falling roughly into three periods: the True Renaissance (1400—I 500); the High Renaissance (isoo-1600) and Mannerism and Baroque (1600—T700) ... it was in Rome that the first serious studies were made of the ruins of antiquity and the startling discovery of proportion as an echo of the rational human mind (The Landscape of Civilization, 1989). He then conjures up the formal Renaissance garden: ... the mythological caryatids, the long shady airy arcade, the tremendous folly, the splendid carpet patterned in evergreens and fountains, the music and sparkle of rising and falling waters and the dignity and grandeur of it all'.

The gardens designed by such architect, as Rernardo Buontalenti in the sixteenth centur), and ,knclre Lc Notre in the seventeenth were symmetrical, formal, carefully proportioned and treated like rooms in a palace. Plants played second fiddle to statuary, garden buildings and, most importantly, water.