Garden

• 1. Introduction

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  A garden is the one place in nature where the wildest tangle is still, at heart, controlled. The source puts it plainly. The single feature identifying even the wildest wild garden is control. That word does a lot of work. It separates a garden from a forest, a meadow, or a patch of weeds nobody planted. A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the cultivation, display, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature. It can hold both natural and artificial materials at once. Some gardens exist only to please the eye. Others quietly grow the herbs and vegetables that end up on a dinner table. How did a word that simply means an enclosure come to cover royal hunting parks, Zen gravel raked into stillness, and a small patch of lawn behind a house? Why did one Chinese ruler fill a pool with wine and hang roasted meat from the trees, and why did later historians treat that garden as a warning? And why was gardening not even considered an art in Europe until kings started chasing the gardens of Italy? Those questions wind through everything that follows.

• 2. The Meaning Of Enclosure

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  The word itself begins with a wall. The etymology traces gardin through Anglo-French gardin and jardin, of Germanic origin, akin to Old High German gard and gart, meaning an enclosure or compound. That same root sits inside the place name Stuttgart. The idea of a defined, fenced space runs through its cousins. The words yard, court, and the Latin hortus are all cognates, each pointing to a bounded piece of land. From hortus come the English words horticulture and orchard.

  In British English, the word narrows to something domestic. There, a garden is a small enclosed area of land, usually adjoining a building. The same patch in American English would be called a yard. The general sense survives in older usage too. Zoos, which display wild animals in simulated natural habitats, were once known as zoological gardens. Western gardens are almost universally built on plants, with the word often standing in as a shortened form of botanical garden. Yet that plant-centered assumption is not universal. Some eastern traditions, such as Zen gardens, use plants sparsely or not at all, a reminder that enclosure, not foliage, is the older idea.

• 3. Royal Parks Of Ancient China

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  The earliest recorded Chinese gardens grew in the valley of the Yellow River during the Shang dynasty, between 1600 and 1046 BC. These were not flower beds but large enclosed parks where kings and nobles hunted game, and where fruit and vegetables were raised. Inscriptions from the period, carved onto tortoise shells, preserve three characters for garden: you, written as a royal enclosure for birds and animals; pu, a garden for plants; and yuan. During the Qin dynasty, between 221 and 206 BC, yuan became the single character for all gardens. Its old form is a tiny picture of a garden, a square wall enclosing the plan of a structure, a small square for a pond, and a symbol for a plantation or a pomegranate tree.

  King Wenwang built one famous royal garden west of his capital at Yin, called the Terrace, Pond and Park of the Spirit, its name recorded as Lingtai, Lingzhao Lingyou. The Classic of Poetry described it. A darker example came from King Zhou, the last Shang ruler, who lived between 1675 and 1029 BC. He built Shaqui, the Dunes of Sand, an earth terrace rising from a large square park, recorded in the Records of the Grand Historian. Its most notorious feature was the Wine Pool and Meat Forest. A pool large enough for small boats was lined with polished oval stones from the seashore, then filled with wine. On a small island in its center, trees were planted with skewers of roasted meat hanging from their branches. King Zhou drifted there with friends and concubines, drinking wine by the handful and eating meat from the trees. Later Chinese philosophers and historians held the whole scene up as an example of decadence and bad taste.

  The pursuit of grandeur did not end with the Shang. During the Spring and Autumn period, in 535 BC, King Jing of the Zhou dynasty raised the Terrace of Shanghua with its lavishly decorated palaces. In 505 BC came something even more elaborate, the Terrace of Gusu, set on a mountainside with terraces linked by galleries and a lake where boats shaped like blue dragons sailed. From its highest terrace, the view reached all the way to Lake Tai, the Great Lake.

• 4. Gardens Across Asia

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  Manasollasa, a twelfth century Sanskrit text, treats garden design alongside many other subjects. Its Vana-krida chapter recommends about 40 types of trees for a park, and it describes both public parks and woodland gardens. A later Indian text, the sixteenth century Shilparatna, gives placement advice, stating that flower gardens or public parks should sit in the northern portion of a town.

  Japan's earliest recorded gardens belonged to emperors and nobles, surfacing in brief passages of the Nihon Shoki, the first chronicle of Japanese history, published in 720 CE. In spring 74 CE, it recorded that the Emperor Keiko put a few carp into a pond and rejoiced to see them morning and evening. The next year, the Emperor launched a double-hulled boat on the pond of Ijishi at Ihare and feasted aboard with his imperial concubine. In 486, the chronicle noted that the Emperor Kenzo went into the garden and feasted at the edge of a winding stream.

  Korean gardens follow a different instinct, described as natural, informal, simple and unforced, seeking to merge with the natural world. Their history reaches back more than two thousand years, yet they remain little known in the west. The oldest records date to the Three Kingdoms period, from 57 BC to 668 AD, when palace gardens and architecture showed a development noted in the Korean History of the Three Kingdoms.

• 5. Europe Discovers The Garden

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  Gardening was not recognized as an art form in Europe until the mid 16th century, when it entered political discourse as a symbol of the ideal republic. The imagery was utopian, evoking the Garden of Eden, a time of abundance and plenty before humans knew hunger or the conflicts of property disputes. Writing in the early 17th century, John Evelyn called it a laborious life, yet a labour full of tranquility and satisfaction, Natural and Instructive, and such as contributes to Piety and Contemplation. During the era of Enclosures, the agrarian collectivism of the feudal age was idealized in literary fantasies of liberating regression to garden and wilderness.

  France caught the fever from Italy. After his 1495 campaign, where he saw the gardens and castles of Naples, King Charles VIII brought Italian craftsmen and designers north, among them Pacello da Mercogliano, and ordered Italian-style gardens at the Chateau d'Amboise and at Chateau Gaillard. His successor Henry II, who had met Leonardo da Vinci in Italy, created an Italian garden at the Chateau de Blois. Beginning in 1528, King Francis I built new gardens at the Chateau de Fontainebleau, with fountains, parterres, a forest of pine trees brought from Provence, and the first artificial grotto in France. The Chateau de Chenonceau gained two gardens in the new style, one for Diane de Poitiers in 1551 and a second for Catherine de' Medici in 1560. In 1536, the architect Philibert de l'Orme returned from Rome and built the gardens of the Chateau d'Anet by Italian rules of proportion, their harmony of parterres and water making one of the earliest and most influential examples of the classic French garden.

  The French formal garden, the jardin a la francaise, set itself against the English landscape garden, the jardin a l'anglaise, choosing to force nature rather than leave it undisturbed. French formal gardens favored parterres, geometrical shapes and neatly clipped topiary, while the English style let plants and shrubs seem to grow naturally without artifice. By the mid-17th century, axial symmetry dominated French tradition through Andre Mollet and Jacques Boyceau, the latter insisting that all things, however beautiful, will be defective if they are not ordered and placed in proper symmetry. The Tuileries gardens in Paris, first designed in the reign of King Henry II, were later reworked into the formal French style for the Sun King Louis XIV, their long rows of elm and chestnut, clipped hedgerows and parterres reflecting the orderly triumph of man's will over nature.

• 6. Britain's Garden Traditions

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  Britain's homegrown gardening was mostly practical rather than aesthetic, unlike the grand gardens found on castle grounds and, less commonly, in universities. Tudor gardens prized contrast over transition, working through color and illusion. They were not meant to complement a house or its architecture but stood as independent spaces, arranged to grow and display flowers and ornamental plants. Gardeners showed their artistry in knot gardens, weaving box hedges into complex arrangements, sometimes with fragrant herbs like rosemary. Sanded paths ran between the hedges of open knots, while closed knots were filled with single-colored flowers. Knot and parterre gardens always sat on level ground, with elevated areas reserved for terraces from which their intricacy could be admired.

  The styles that followed slowly tamed that early disorder. In 1624, Henry Wotton called Jacobean gardens a delightful confusion. Under the influence of the Italian Renaissance, Caroline gardens began shedding the chaos of earlier designs, moving toward symmetrical, unified layouts that took building architecture into account and added an elevated terrace overlooking both home and garden. The only surviving Caroline garden sits at Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire, though the source calls it too simple to attract much interest. Under Charles II many new Baroque country houses rose, while earlier, in England, Oliver Cromwell sought to destroy many Tudor, Jacobean and Caroline gardens.

• 7. The Craft Of Design

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  Garden design is the process of creating plans for the layout and planting of gardens and landscapes. Owners may design their own, or hand the work to professionals trained in design and horticulture who know how to use plants. Some professional garden designers are also landscape architects, a more formal level of training that usually demands an advanced degree and often an occupational license. Landscape architects tend to design at many scales, working on both public and private projects.

  The elements split into the built and the living. Hard landscape covers paths, rockeries, walls, water features, sitting areas and decking, while the plants demand attention to their horticultural needs, their season-to-season appearance, lifespan, growth habit, size, and how they combine with each other. Even a very natural garden remains an inherently artificial creation. Natural elements include flora such as trees and weeds, fauna such as arthropods and birds, plus soil, water, air and light. Constructed elements include sculptures, drainage systems, lights and buildings like sheds, gazebos, pergolas and follies, alongside living constructions such as flower beds, ponds and lawns.

  Maintenance shapes every choice. The time or funds available for upkeep can steer decisions about a plant's speed of growth, its tendency to spread or self-seed, and its bloom-time. Design splits roughly into two camps, formal and naturalistic. The most important consideration is how the garden will be used, followed by the desired style and how the space connects to the home, all of it bound by budget. A tighter budget points toward fewer plants, cheaper hard landscape materials, seeds rather than sod for lawns, and fast-growing plants. Alternatively, owners may build their garden slowly, area by area.

• 8. Gardens And The Climate

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  Gardeners sit on both sides of the environmental ledger, able to damage their surroundings or to enhance them. The harms are concrete. Houses and gardens can directly destroy natural habitats, and gathering materials like peat and rock for rock gardens causes indirect damage. Metaldehyde slug killer kills not only slugs and snails but their predators, hedgehogs and song thrushes. Indiscriminate plant collectors can drive local species to extinction, and the greenhouse gases of gardening feed climate change.

  The three main greenhouse gases name the problem: carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Gardeners release carbon dioxide by over-cultivating soil and destroying soil carbon, by burning garden waste on bonfires, by running power tools, and by using peat. They produce methane by compacting soil and compost heaps until they turn anaerobic. They produce nitrous oxide by applying excess nitrogen fertilizer when plants are not actively growing, letting soil bacteria convert it. The remedies mirror the causes. Trees, shrubs, ground cover and other perennial plants help, as does turning garden waste into soil organic matter instead of burning it, keeping soil and compost aerated, avoiding peat, swapping power tools for hand tools, and using nitrogen-fixing plants instead of fertilizer.

  Water offers its own lessons. Some gardeners manage entirely without water from outside the garden. British examples include Ventnor Botanic Garden on the Isle of Wight, along with parts of Beth Chatto's garden in Essex, Sticky Wicket garden in Dorset, and the Royal Horticultural Society's gardens at Harlow Carr and Hyde Hall. Rain gardens take a related approach, absorbing rainfall from nearby hard surfaces rather than flushing it into stormwater drains.