Gardening A
Very
PHistory eculiar
TM
With NO added slugs
‘Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies.’ Dylan Thomas, (1914–1953), Under Milk Wood
For Creina, a great gardener. JM
Editors: Stephen Haynes, Caroline Coleman Editorial assistants: Rob Walker, Mark Williams Published in Great Britain in MMXIV by Book House, an imprint of The Salariya Book Company Ltd 25 Marlborough Place, Brighton BN1 1UB www.salariya.com www.book-house.co.uk HB ISBN-13: 978-1-909645-19-6 © The Salariya Book Company Ltd MMXIV All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. 135798642 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in Dubai. Printed on paper from sustainable sources. This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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Gardening A
Very
eculiar PHistory
TM
With NO added slugs Written by
Jacqueline Morley
Created and designed by
David Salariya
‘If you would be happy for a week, take a wife, if you would be happy for a month, kill your pig, but if you would be happy all your life, plant a garden.’ Chinese proverb
‘God Almighty first planted a garden; and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man without which buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks.’ Francis Bacon, English philosopher and statesman, 1561–1626
‘The kiss of the sun for pardon, The song of the birds for mirth, One is nearer God’s heart in the garden Than anywhere else on earth.’ Dorothy Frances Gurney (1858–1932), God’s Garden
Contents Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6
Gardens of the ancient world Islamic gardens Medieval gardens Renaissance gardens The New World The 17th century: The garden grandiose 7 The 18th century: The landscape garden 8 The 19th century: Plants in profusion 9 The 20th century: Gardens in war and peace 10 The 21st century: Wildlife gardening Glossary A gardening timeline Index
7 9 35 53 69 87 103 119 139 155 173 180 183 186
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INTRODUCTION
T
he history of cultivation – making the earth grow the plants you want – goes back at least 10,000 years, when wily hunter-gatherers saved the plumpest grass seeds and put them back in a convenient piece of soil. But gardening – growing plants for the pleasure of looking at them – arose much later. When you are struggling to grow enough food to survive, you sow crops, plant orchards and train vines. For gardening you need a surplus, however small, of wealth and time. That’s why our story begins with kings and princes, though it ends on a much more democratic note, when even flat-dwellers can have window boxes – if they have time to water them.
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A fresco of a Roman garden, painted in Pompeii some time before AD 79
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Chapter One
GARDENS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
‘
T
he Lord God walked in the garden in the cool of the day,’ we are told in Genesis 3 : 8 . This vision of God’s perfect garden seems to be as old as our human imaginings. It was around long before the Hebrew compiler of Genesis described it as the garden of Paradise, the source of the waters of life whose four great rivers nourish the earth.
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Gardening
A Very Peculiar History
One of the oldest poems in the world, the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh (from the second millennium BC), describes this perfect place. Its hero, searching for the secret of eternal life, reaches the mountain at the ends of the earth and discovers the wondrous Garden of the Gods from which a great river springs. Here the ‘plant of life’ grows and the trees bear jewelled fruits: All round him stood bushes bearing gems . . . fruit of carnelian with the vine hanging from it, beautiful to look at; lapis lazuli leaves hung thick with fruit, sweet to see . . . rare stones, agate and pearls from out the sea.
These versions of paradise have all the ingredients which characterised the gardens of the ancient Middle East and later Persian ones: the enclosure or set-apartness (God set up a flaming sword to keep Adam and Eve out of Eden – and, though we’re not told whether this was at the gate, Eden surely had one), the importance of water as the source of life, and the four streams into which the water is divided.
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Gardens Of the anCient wOrld
‘Paradise’ is a Persian word that originally meant a walled enclosure. The essence of these earliest gardens is that they were a shut-away treat, a blissful escape from blazing sun and sand-laden winds, a luxury that only kings and princes could afford. Ordinary folk had to be at work all day in the fields of their masters, growing the food on which everyone else’s lives depended. (They might have a patch of land they called their own, but it had not only to keep them alive but also to grow the extra they must hand over as tax. No wonder they weren’t bothering with flowers!) You can’t have a garden unless you have water. In fact you can’t have a flourishing civilisation without a reliable water supply. It’s no coincidence that the earliest civilisations, in ancient Egypt and in Mesopotamia, grew up beside large rivers. Before 3000 BC Sumerian tribes were draining the swampy ground between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers and the Egyptians were trapping the Nile’s floodwater for year-round use.
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