Baroque garden
The grandest example is found in the Gardens of Versailles designed during the 17th century by the landscape architect André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV.
In the 18th century, in imitation of Versailles, very ornate Baroque gardens were built in other parts of Europe, including Germany, Austria, Spain, and in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
In the late 15th century, the architect, artist and writer Leon Battista Alberti proposed that the house and garden were both sanctuaries from the confusion of the outside world and that they both should be designed with architectural forms, geometric rooms, and corridors.
In a very popular allegorical story, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Song of Poliphile) (1499), one of the first printed novels, the Dominican priest and author Francesco Colonna described a garden composed of carefully designed ornamental flowerbeds and rows of trees shaped in geometric forms.
The new garden, on the bluff above the Seine, featured an extensive belvedere with ramps and stairways, scattered with an assortment of pavilions, grottoes, and theatres.
The central feature of this garden was a main axis descending from the château, composed of a series of terraces decorated with parterres of low hedges in ornamental designs.
Large basins with jeux d'eau were placed along the central axis, and the garden was set between rows of trimmed trees on the left and right, to lead the eye on the long perspective to the last fountain and grotto below.
It was built around the original small square park of ninety-three hectares before the château started for Louis XIII by Jacques Boyceau in 1638.
In 1662 following the model of Vaux-le-Vicomte, Le Nôtre made the park ten times larger, centered on a grand canal which reached to the horizon.
A third enlargement expanded the park by another six thousand five hundred hectares, including forests for hunting and several nearby villages, surrounded by a wall forty-three kilometres long with twenty-two gates.
[7] The centrepiece of the garden was the Fountain of Apollo, the symbol of Louis XIV, the sun king himself, surrounded by a network of paths, basins, colonnades, theaters, and monuments.
The hilltop location, overlooking the Rhine, limited the size and presented difficult terrain, but de Caus succeeded in building a series of parterres with concentric circles of greenery, a circular fountain, and a bosquet of laurel trees, ingeniously linked by stairways and ramps.
[11] Another notable Baroque garden in Germany is the Schlosspark, Brühl (1728), designed by Dominic Girard, who was a pupil of Le Nôtre at Versailles.
A large water basin on the upper terrace was connected by stairs and cascades, filled with statues of nymphs and goddesses to the lower garden.
The upper garden of Het Loo was primarily inspired by Versailles, with paths radiating from a central alley, while the lower garden, in front of the palace, showed a Dutch influence, divided into independent sections, each different, and divided by alleys lined with the characteristic hedges and trees of the Dutch countryside.
At the beginning of the 18th century, he created a garden modelled after Versailles at the Royal Palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso, not far from Segovia.
[17] He used the natural slope of the site in the palace grounds design, for enhancing axial visual perspectives, and to provide sufficient head for water to shoot out/up from the twenty-six sculptural fountains in the formal gardens and the later landscape park.
During his visit to France in 1677–1678 he spent a great deal of time with Le Nôtre, who had a lasting influence of Tessin's garden designs.
He brought the French architect Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond to St. Petersburg to design gardens for his new capital city and for his new palace.
The new plans called for a formal garden on the upper terrace, and for a grand cascade pouring down the hillside from the palace to a canal, with fountains, leading out to the Gulf.
At times a large portion of the French army was devoted to digging channels and constructing systems to bring water to the gardens of Versailles.
[20] One of the first English gardens on the continent was at Ermenonville, in France, built by marquis René Louis de Girardin from 1763 to 1776 and based on the ideals of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was buried within the park.
The central English Grounds of Wörlitz, in the Principality of Anhalt, was laid out between 1769 and 1773 by Leopold III, based on the models of Claremont, Stourhead, and Stowe landscape gardens.
