Medieval garden

Cordoba itself was prominent in the Islamic Golden Age, and Christian Europe owed much in science, medicine and botany to exchanges in times of peace.

In England, the new Tudor dynasty after 1485 brought a style influenced by Burgundy and France, but that soon developed distinctive elements in its knot gardens and carved heraldic beasts on poles.

[19] Meanwhile, lower down the social scale, English county quarter sessions would record a purchase of freehold land from the twelfth century via a fine of lands, and gardens were listed alongside messuages, and arable and woodland acreage, confirming that gardens were not just for high-status establishments but were increasingly normal accompaniments to those of rector, squire and farmer, contributing to the medieval diet.

These are no more help in visualising medieval gardens, for similar reasons to the religious images, as the poetry was generally allegorical romance with visions of earthly paradise and promoted the code of chivalric honour, including courtly love.

[25] These images and poetics may be of only limited help in visualising medieval gardens, but the miniatures illustrate their construction and floristic content, while the poems provide English terms for them, bypassing the Latinised versions found in earlier accounts.

[27] Many illuminated manuscripts show gardens of rectangular beds, small enough to be worked from the side paths, in available locations within castle or palace walls and intended for choice plants.

[31] The surround to a whole enclosed garden might be simple hedge, in which case it would probably consist of pleached quickset (hawthorn) entwined with brambles and dog roses.

Pruned and clipped evergreen trees or shrubs, often sweet-bay, and sometimes trained into estrade shapes, could be grown in northern Europe in pots and plunged as the garden was re-made, only to be raised in the autumn and taken indoors away from the cold.

Perhaps the abundance of miniatures depicting such scenes gives the impression that medieval gardens were perforce tightly constrained, but it is important to remember that the hortus conclusus was not the limit of recreational activity, especially for the menfolk.

[8] Often pleasure gardens (discussed below) formed a separate space, enclosed by a wall, fence or hedge a walk away from the busy and tightly built-up castle itself.

Although parks are generally thought of as hunting reserves, they served a wider recreational purpose and might have menageries and places of retreat with their own herbers; the prime English example, Woodstock, had all of these by the 13th century.

[42] Henry I of England considered Woodstock Palace the 'favourite seat of his retirement and privacy' and where from 1113 he enclosed a large park with a stone wall containing a variety of exotic animals.

[44] At Palermo around 1150, the Norman King Roger II of Sicily built a vast park enclosed by a stone wall with a series of pavilions or palaces served by water brought by underground conduits and then conducted from one pool to another.

[45] By 1166, though at a much smaller scale, Henry II of England created a series of three pools below a spring close to Woodstock Palace and to which were attached cloisters and other buildings.

The bridge to it was lined with marionettes of monkeys covered in badger skin and there were bowers, a hut that could turn to avoid the wind, a rose garden and water-spouting devices.

[47] In his book on husbandry, Liber Ruralium Commodorum, written about 1300, Pietro de' Crescenzi envisaged larger gardens as small parks with ‘a fountain flowing through all its parts and places’, aviaries and numbers of stags, roebucks, hares and rabbits.

[50] Half a century later, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and brother of Henry V, rebuilt the manor house at Greenwich, on the Thames downstream from London, and enclosed a park of 188 acres.

One would level the ground, sterilise it with boiling water, lay turf, tamp it down and plant it around the edges with taller flowers and ornamental trees.

[59] Smaller flowers could be dug out of meadows and planted as plugs into the sward, giving the millefleur or flowery mead effect, and later in the year the grass would be suppressed by rolling.

Colder climatic conditions set in during the fourteenth century, and vineyards declined as commercial enterprises, though vines remained in decorative contexts, for example growing on trellises in herbers.

[73] The 15th century poet John Lydgate described an herber/arbour with turfed bench seats and a fountain: Alle the aleis were made playne with sond, The benches turved with newe turvis grene, Sote herbers, with condite at the honde, That wellid up agayne the sonne shene, Lyke silver stremes as any christalle clene...[74] Whether a luxury for its scarcity, as in Sicily, or a practicality because of its abundance, as in England, water was a much desired decorative element in medieval gardens and parks.

[80] Calendar miniatures for May (and sometimes April) often show a mixed party in a small boat with blossoming branches, sometimes playing music; a traditional May Day celebration across much of Europe.

[87] Albertus Magnus wrote of viridaria around 1260 that ‘no trees must be planted in the middle of the turf... if possible, a clear fountain in a stone basin should be in the midst, for its purity gives much pleasure’.

[89] The familiar southern Italian courtyard with pools or fountains amid flower-studded grass, vine pergolas and shaded walks, is well recorded from the thirteenth century.

[96] The last flourish of the gallery was perhaps at Henry's cousin Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham's Thornbury Castle, Gloucestershire, where before his execution in 1521 stone-built ones overlooked enclosed gardens; nearby was a magnificent herber, also one of the last.

Sir Frank Crisp then made strenuous efforts to support both in his Mediæval Gardens (1924) but had to admit that he found no evidence amongst his numerous images from illuminated manuscripts of medieval mounts, mazes or knots.

His images amply demonstrated that turfed benches, lattice-work fences, the flowery mead, fountains and the arbour belonged to his period, but he was perhaps too easily persuaded of the antiquity of other features.

The snail-mount at Marlborough, Wiltshire (actually Neolithic), cut with a spiral path in the seventeenth century, was offered as a surviving example of a late medieval mount.

[101] According to popular legend, Henry II had his meetings with his mistress Rosamund Clifford in a bower at Woodstock in the middle of a "labyrinth", but she was tracked down and given the choice of poison or a dagger by the jealous queen.

[103] She ascribed great antiquity to mizmazes, and the conception of them as authentic folk devices with origins in deep history, lives on, but the plain fact is that no English garden mazes, or rural ones, can be cited with certainty before the late sixteenth century.