Tom Turner The Principles of Garden Design
Tom Turner 24 Historic Styles of Garden Design
The eBook explains the 3 classic design principles: gardens should be useful, gardens should be well-made and gardens should be beautiful. The principles come from Vitruvius. They have influenced the design of gardens since ancient times and are as important today as they have always been.
The eBook gives simple and clear explanations of the use and form of the 24 best-known historic styles of garden design in the west. The period covered extends from the temples and courtyards of Ancient Egypt to the Modern and Postmodern styles of the 21st century, including recent examples of show gardens from the Chelsea Flower Show.
ISBN 978-0-9542306-2-3, 45 pages, 130 illustrations, 2008, ÂŁ7.50
ISBN 978-0-9542306-3-0, 84 pages, 230 illustrations, 2008, ÂŁ9.50
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Stainless steel, reflecting vegetation
Some of the modern materials used in gardens show every sign of being as good as the old materials: beautiful and durable, like laminated glass and stainless steel. The aging process is a key issue. Lead and stone grow old gracefully. Glass and stainless steel retain their perfection. Copper and lead are expensive materials but long-lasting and capable of developing beautiful patina as they age. Oak develops a silver sheen as it ages. The cheap softwoods rot and stain.
Greenish glass sphere
Copper fountain
Fern leaf in stainless steel
Planting by Tom Stuart-Smith, with a steel backdrop, at the 2006 Chelsea Flower Show
Green and white: Angelica and Aquilegia
Astilbe and Lobelia
Stipa arundinacea with Achillea
Planting design
‘Use only the best materials’ also applies to plants. Some good plants can be obtained from the low-price suppliers. But for many plants you need good varieties which can only be obtained from known suppliers, who may be friends or specialist nurseries. They can be varieties you have seen or obtained by mail order or bought from suppliers you can trust to have found the best varieties and grown them with good roots and without pests or diseases.
Red poppies and bricks, by Denise Preston
This garden is a home for the Genius of the Place (Genius Loci)
Vitruvius and the Genius Loci
A Roman grotto, at Ninfeo di Egeria
The ancient principles of design were formulated by a Roman author, Vitruvius Pollio. He applied them to architecture, clocks, harbours, siege engines and other 3-D objects. Had he given more attention to outdoor space, Vitruvius might have added another Roman concept to the list of design principles: the Genius Loci. For garden design, this phrase is translated into English as ‘the Genius of the Place’ and used to describe the local factors which could and should influence a design. Alexander Pope expressed the principle in verse: Consult the genius of the place in all; That tells the waters or to rise, or fall; Or helps th’ ambitious hill the heav’ns to scale Or scoops in circling theatres the vale; Calls in the country, catches opening glades, Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades, Now breaks, or now directs, th’ intending lines; Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.
An English grotto, at Painshill
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Classical Courtyard c100 BCE Style Five
Use: Space within walled cities was always valuable and expensive. Only the rich could afford small gardens. The poor lived in a single room with a door opening onto the street and no windows. Courtyards were made for specialised purposes, broadly similar to those of the Egyptian domestic garden: outdoor eating, entertaining, growing plants. In towns, they had to be enclosed by high walls owing to the proximity of neighbours and the demands of security and privacy. Walls also created an urban climate, warm in winter and cool in summer. Form: Three types of courtyard were made: 1. a yard (atrium) in the centre of the dwelling giving access to other rooms and to the street. It was a lightwell, a ventilation shaft and a place catch rainwater. 2. a colonaded yard (peristyle) ornamented and used as an outdoor living and dining room. The roofed colondade gave access to the rooms and courtyards often had pools, fountains, statues, a small shrine and planting (bay, myrtle, oleander, rosemary, box, ivy’, rose, iris, lily, violet, daisy, poppy and chrysanthemum. 3. a horticultural space (xystus) was used for flowers and vegetables and might be decorated with statues, a pavilion and a water features. The best examples of small Roman courtyards are in the once-buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum - and there is also a re-created courtyard from the Villa dei Papiri at the Getty Museum (photo above).
Villa dei Papiri (Photo Jean-Pierre Louis)
Classical courtyard gardens in Pompeii
Castle Garden c 1300 CE Style Nine
Use: Forts were occupied by soldiers and used exclusively for military purposes. From the middle ages onwards, castles were places for families to live with their dependents and retainers. Some had small pleasure gardens within their walls, primarily for the use of ladies, children, swains and troubadours. In times of siege, an army, or the poplulation of the local village, would occupy the space inside the outer fortifications and, presumably, trample the garden. Form: The garden could be a small rectangular, hexagonal or irregular enclosure, inside the outer fortification (bailey). There are many surviving castle spaces where one can see places for such gardens within the inner or outer bailey. No examples survive but there are symbolic illustrations of them in medieval prayer books and romances. They show trellis fencing, flowery lawns, turf seats, tunnel-arbours and a profusion of sweet-scented flowers. Most of the land within the bailey would not have smelt sweet. Castles also had orchards and hunting parks outside the fortified zone.
Werfen Castle, Austria (Photo courtesy Nathan Wong)
Herber is the medieval word for a planted garden (from the Latin herba, meaning either grass or a herbaceous plant). The herber could be used for medicinal plants or flowers. Later the word came to be used for an arbour. Medieval castles had small planted areas within the fortifications, protected by wooden fences and used as sitting areas for ladies and their swains. Castles also had larger pleasure gardens outside their fortifications.
Ambras Castle, Austria, has a garden re-creation loosely based on old drawings (above and below).
Salzburg Castle has fortified platforms of the type once used for gardens in time of peace and for soldiers in time of war.
Marie-Luise Gothein Indian Gardens ISBN 978-0-9542306-4-7, 112 pages, 260 illustrations, 2008, £15.50 This is the first English translation of Marie-Luise Gothein’s classic Indische Garten (1926). It is a real work of scholarship and a much more extensive treatment of Indian gardens than in her monumental History of Garden Art. Gothein learnt Sanskrit in order to research the subject.
Gilbert Laing Meason The World’s First Book on Landscape Architecture 15 pages, 10 illustrations, 2008, £4.50 This book contains the chapter and illustrations with which Meason explains his conception of ‘Landscape Architecture’. The term was adopted by Loudon, Downing, Vaux, Olmsted and the landscape architecture profession worldwide. The chapter contains engravings of paintings by Giorgioni, Breemberg, Veronese, Mantegna, Julio Romano, Siciolante Da Sermoneta, Giotto and Poussin.
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Introduction encouragement from Frederick I of Prussia. His son, Frederick the Great loved French culture and it may be that the name took root in German for this reason. Marie-Luise’s father was a lawyer named Schroeter. This name derives from the Middle High German schrotaere meaning ‘a carrier of wine or beer barrels’. The Gotheins lived in Lower Silesia and Marie-Luise went to study at the University of Wroclaw (then University of Breslau) in Silesia A beautiful city on the Odra River at the foot of the Sudety Mountains, it was the ducal capital of Lower Silesia (310 km southwest of Warsaw and 200 km east of Dresden, in Germany). Wroclaw had long been settled by Germans, who gave it the name Breslau in 1261. After the accession of the Spanish prince Ferdinand I to the Bohemian throne in 1526 it became a Habsburg possession. After the War of Austrian Succession, in 1714, Frederick the Great took the city. It was natural for a child from this region to take an interest in history. Its turbulent history could have made her a conservative but in fact made her a liberal.
Marie Luise Gothein was an outstanding garden historian. She was born on 12th September 1863 and died on 24th December 1931. Her 2-volume History of Garden Art was published in German in 1913 and in English in 1928 (with the addition of chapters 17 and 18). It is a masterly overview of the subject, carefully researched, well illustrated and gilded with excellent design judgement. Gothein was born in an area of East Prussia which reverted to Poland after the Second World War. Her given name, Marie-Luise suggests that her family was of French extraction. This is possible. Many French protestant families had moved to Eastern Germany with
Marie-Luise studied History and the History of Art in Breslau - and fell in love with Eberhard Gothein, a teacher and ten years her senior. They became engaged when she was 19 and married four years later (in 1885) when he secured job at the University of Karlsruhe. Though Gothein died 15 years before I was born, I came to think of her as a friend, and almost a relative, when writing a book on Garden history, philosophy and design (2005). I believed I was still following in her footsteps when on my first visit to India. But then I came across the reprint of her book with a note by Horst Schumacher. He reports as follows: “Dr. Dieter Gothein, one of her grandsons has kindly advised me by letter of 7 October 1999: ‘After the perusal of the copies of her diaries of her journey to East Asia, which are difficult to
Chapter One
Hindu Influence
The Indo-European people who settled in India, and whom Gothein refers to as Aryans, are thought to have come from the Caususes region between the Black Sea and The Caspian. Their language and culture spread west into Europe and south east into India. The extent to which migrations took place is unknown. The ancient literature Gothein refers to is the Vedas. (Images courtesy NASA)
The Rigveda is one of the oldest texts of any Indo-European language. The vedas were composed in the present-day Punjab (c1500–1000 BCE) and inscribed c300BCE after being passed on orally for over 1,000 years.
The Aryans are among the world’s most ancient cultures. They advanced from the north and gradually took possession of the huge subcontinent of India. Since their literature, became known in the western hemisphere, it has had a great influence on our spiritual lives, which can still be felt today. It is not even remotely matched by the literature of the other two ancient peoples: those of Egypt and Babylon. However, while we are able to read the early history of Egypt and Babylon in stones and buildings, we realise with bewilderment that the fine arts, whose monuments India preserves, belong to fairly recent times. Architecture and sculptures, whose remnants could tell us their history, do not survive from preBuddhist India, i.e. before the 3rd Century BC. For a very long time, buildings were restricted to religious art. Temples and other sacred edifices were concealed in caves. Early art tells about the worship bestowed on the Exulted One, the most sacred Buddha. It can be taken as probable that the Indian people did not use temples in the days of the Vedas. The evidence of worship which can still be found is limited to sacrificial altars, which were elaborate in their paraphernalia but which had to be assembled every time they were used. However, the Vedas formed the end of a cultural era; since then, the culture of the Indian people has changed greatly. Not only were the spiritual dominance of the Brahminic religion and the resulting development of castes hardly known in the era of the Vedas, the Vedic deities were replaced by other gods. And with the new gods, which derived from local cults, it was less likely that all those centuries before the arrival of the Buddha would have passed without leaving any lasting places of worship or temples. The literature of the Vedic era, which is so abundant in spiritual substance, of course leaves us with hardly any
Jag Mandir, an island in Lake Piccola, Udaipur (above and below)
around the fragmented mother tree, it would not be physically impossible – but even Sri Lanka is ravaged by devastating storms and legend tends to exaggerate, especially with regard to the age of trees. The area in which this tree stands used to be enclosed by a wall made of blocks of granite, whose ledges and escarpments were inlaid with chunam, a material similar to ivory. These enclosed a very large concourse, which could be entered via four gates of great architectural beauty. Each of these entrances was covered by a canopylike roof made of ore, which rested on twenty stone pillars, each made hewn from one single block of stone. Part of the closest vicinity of the tree has retained its old structure. The plinth and its ledges consist of mighty granite Plates; a number of steps lead to the base, which is adorned by rich imagery; the bottom step, which protrudes as a semi-circle, stands out. On both sides, kerb stones are decorated with bas-relieves, and on the step, semicircular strips have been attached containing animal ornaments with a mystic meaning, the so-called moon stones, which can be found frequently as steps (Fig.. 4).
Fig 4 Udaipur, Jag Mandir, Palace of Prince Khurram The tree itself stands on a rather high, cascading terrace; the buildings, which used to surround the sacred concourse, lie in ruins; the existing buildings are all of a more recent date. In India, veneration of the fig tree is however not restricted to Buddhists. It is part of the Aryan heritage. The Epic mentions it as an ex
Gilbert Laing Meason On the Landscape Architecture of the Great Painters of Italy Editorial Note by Tom Turner Gilbert Laing Meason wrote the world’s first book on landscape architecture and the full text is included in the Garden History Reference Encyclopedia CD, with a commentary. This extract comprises the seventh of ten chapters from Meason’s book On the Landscape Architecture of the Great Painters of Italy. It is the only chapter dealing with Meason’s conception of ‘landscape architecture’. He invented the term and used it to describe a type of architecture characteristic of ‘the great painters of Italy’. The book was published in London in 1828 but only 150 copies were printed, of which 100 copies were sold and 50 were given away. It is not known how many survive, but it cannot be many. The Library of Congress does not have a copy but Harvard University has two copies. Following Meason, the term ‘landscape architecture’ was taken up by John Claudius Loudon, Andrew Jackson Downing, Calvert Vaux, Frederick Law Olmsted - and then by the landscape architecture profession worldwide [see online text of Downing’s chapter on Landscape or Rural Architecture]. Meason’s love of Italy and its paintings is unswerving, yet he also admires the English tradition and the ‘principles of Mr Price’. Meason’s prime subject is architecture, rather than what we now describe, following the phrase he devised for the title of his book, as ‘landscape architecture’. His interest in architecture seems to have been inspired from outward appearances (venustas) but extends to the other Vitruvian virtues of firmitas and utilitas. The importance of use and beauty is stressed and he was much impressed by Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight. Meason’s book therefore provides a firm foundation for the theory of landscape architecture. Meason deals with: 1. The Vitruvian design objectives: Commodity (utilitas), Firmness (firmitas) and Delight (venustas). 2. Context sensitive design: the placing of buildings in context. As Meason remarks: ‘Our parks may be beautiful, our mansions faultless in design, but nothing is more rare than to see the two properly connected’ (see below). 3. The relevance of site characteristics (the Genius Loci) to the design of buildings Please see the Gardenvisit.com website for further discussion of the the Landscape Architecture Profession and the History and Theory of the sister arts: Landscape Architecture and Garden Design.
© Tom Turner. This extract published by Gardenvisit.com. in 2008. All rights reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention.
[Chapter 7 ]
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE OF THE ITALIAN PAINTERS It is due to the talents and taste of Mr. Payne Knight to acknowledge, that this work has originated from the following observation of his in the Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste. “The best style of architecture for irregular and picturesque houses, which can now be adopted, is that mixed style which characterizes the buildings of Claude and the Poussins: for as it is taken from models which were built piecemeal, during many successive ages; and by several different nations, it is distinguished by no particular manner of execution, or class of ornaments; but admits of all promiscuously, from a plain wall or buttress, of the roughest masonry, to the most highly wrought Corinthian capital: and, in a style professedly miscellaneous, such contrasts may be employed to heighten the relish of beauty, without disturbing the enjoyment of it by any appearance of deceit or imposture.
Plate No. 36. GIORGIONI. We have not been able to select from this excellent painter any other specimen than this plain tower and strong hold, adapted for a cultivator, his family, and his flock. In a matter, however, which affords so wide a field for the licentious deviations of whim and caprice, it may be discreet always to pay some attention to authority; especially when we have such authorities as those of the great landscape painters above-mentioned; the study of whose works may at once enrich and restrain invention”. [Knight’s Principles of Taste.] We could with advantage extend our extracts from this author on taste, on the choice of situations for a country