My Favorite Garden Style

Gardens are very much an experience - both physical and emotional. It's one thing to study gardens on paper and look at pictures, but it is completely different to spend time walking through them. Being immersed in a three-dimensional space invokes emotion, and for this reason, one of my personal favorite garden styles is the Islamic garden.

The first large, historical European garden I visited in my life was La Alhambra and the Generalife, in Grenada, Spain. It was first constructed as a fortress in the 9th century, and was renovated to become an expansive Moorish palace throughout the 11th to 14th centuries. The palace and gardens cover nearly 142,000 square meters, and are perched on a hilltop in Granada.

While the size and the history of La Alhambra are impressive, what I found most appealing about the palace was the Islamic gardens. In true garden form, their beauty simply cannot be portrayed accurately through words and pictures. Rather, they must be observed in person to have their beauty fully appreciated. Nearly every section of La Alhambra has water features of some kind. Pictured below is a central fountain with four streams leading from it, which is common in many Islamic gardens. The water features add a cooling, peaceful element to the gardens while visitors walk through, and it is one of my favorite elements in La Alhambra.

Islamic gardens are unique in that, on the surface, they seem relatively simple. However, they are actually filled with beautiful intricacies and symbolism. It is this deeper meaning that is the reason why Islamic gardens are my favorite. Walking through the gardens of La Alhambra, I was astounded by the detail and beauty of each element in the gardens. The three typical styles used to decorate the Islamic gardens are arabesque, geometric and calligraphic, and the designs that these styles create is endlessly beautiful. 

But it is more than just the physical beauty that I appreciate the Islamic gardens in La Alhambra. I also like the reason that Islamic gardens are filled with these detailed designs: Muslims believe that Allah is beautiful and he loves beauty. Therefore, by creating beautiful works within their gardens, Muslims show their love and devotion to their God. The Islamic garden is outwardly understated, but walking through it allows one a religious experience - it is really filled with abounding beauty and love for Allah that can be appreciated by anyone. 

A Gardening Dream Team

The Arts and Crafts Movement at the end of the 19^th century was spurred by a rejection of the industrial revolution. As Europe was swept up in an age of mechanization and mass-production, some people feared that the appreciation of craftsmanship was lost. As a result, artists and craftspeople developed the Arts and Crafts movement that celebrated designs echoing medieval, folk and country traditions. The garden was not excluded from this movement and two people, Gertrude Jekyll and Edward Lutyens, developed the beautiful Arts and Crafts garden.

Gertrude Jekyll was a prime example of a participant in the Arts and Crafts movement. She dabbled in everything from writing to ironwork, but one of her most influential hobbies was gardening. She was trained as a painter, and was the first to apply painterly color theory to her gardens.

Jekyll worked with Edward Lutyens, who was an architect. They had a unique connection that allowed them to fuse the best aspects of each of their professions to create unique gardens that once again revolutionized garden styles. They worked together in designing the grounds of country cottages, and oftentimes the architectural structure of the house blended almost seamlessly into an artfully designed garden. Their work was featured frequently in Country Life, an English magazine dedicated to the latest styles of country homes, and it was in this way that the team gained popularity. 

Jekyll was inspired by country gardens in Surrey. Her interest was creating beautiful flower gardens, and not whether the plants were native to England. She designed her gardens using color theory, and while transferring the plans from paper to garden seems simple, it was anything but. 

A plan like the one pictured above is two dimensional, but of course, gardens are three dimensional. In order to make her gardens look beautiful, Jekyll had to consider everything from flowering times to heights of plants, to sizes and colors of leaves, and everything in between. Jekyll and Lutyens worked closely with their clients, and designed specifically with their needs and preferences in mind. This incorporates the essence of the Arts and Crafts movement - taking one's own talents to create unique, one-of-a-kind displays of creativity. 

This photo shows Jekyll's and Lutyens garden actualized. It has a herbaceous border, which Jekyll reinvented and revived, and is a perfect example of the naturalistic garden that was very much a part of the Arts and Crafts Movement at the end of the 19th century. 

19th Century Battle of Styles

Towards the end of Queen Victoria's reign in England, the high Victorian garden saw a decline in popularity. Like many garden styles of the past, it was becoming overdone and tawdry. People interested in gardening were interested in developing something fresh and new, and as a result, a battle of styles ensued. The two key players in this battle were William Robinson and Sir Reginald Blomfield. They clashed over how they believed the high Victorian garden style should be abandoned.

Robinson, trained as a gardener and horticulturist, advocated that gardens return to their roots, and that gardeners should be the ones to design gardens, as they understood the plants. He was inspired by observing a summer with poor weather during which the wimpy plantings of the Victorian bedded gardens failed, and people complained that their gardens looked bad. Robinson believed that gardens could and should be hardy, and, if planted correctly, could be beautiful in all seasons. His gardens utilized strong native plants in a naturalistic and artful way to create a peaceful escape.

A Robinson Garden Design

Blomfield, on the other hand, saw gardens as an extension of the architecture of the house. In his eyes, the gardens should be formal, and it should be obvious that they were designed along with the buildings. He was influenced by the formality of the English renaissance garden, and his designs included geometric shapes and often, axial symmetry. Blomfield wanted gardens to look orderly and seamless, and as a result, his designs were formal and focused on close-clipped grass and hedges, along with organized flower beds.

Blomfield Garden at Sulgrave Manor

The Battle of Styles ended in a compromise: the collaboration of Gertrude Jekyll and Sir Edward Lutyens. Jekyll was a gardener and Lutyens was an architect. They meshed both personally and professionally, and this cooperation brought about the garden of the Arts and Crafts movement. This garden style saw the end of the high Victorian gardens, and was the advent of naturalistic, painterly flower gardens that Robinson dreamed of combined with architecture of which Blomfield would be proud.

Green Space in Copenhagen

In the 19th century, Copenhagen saw a boom in parks and green space. The city's fortifications that had been constructed between the 12th and 15th centuries retired as defense systems and transformed into beautiful parks which the people of Copenhagen could enjoy. The bastions originally walled in the city on the west, but as the population expanded and the need for physical defenses disappeared, they became useless. 

The fortifications were made into 4 parks: Ørstedsparken, the Botanical Garden, Østre Anlæg, and Kastellet. Each park recycled the moat from the fortifications to create one or more lakes, and can be seen in the map below. Kastellet is the most recognizable, for its star-shaped design. It is built up around the moat, and is filled with paths along which many Copenhageners jog and walk. Østre Anlæg by contrast, has many more trees and this creates a more wooded atmosphere. It is home to the Statens Museum for Kunst at one end. The Botanical Garden's purpose is twofold. It serves both as a place where city dwellers can go to enjoy the outdoors, but it is also a research facility. In this park, each plant is tagged with a name, and there are conservatories filled with tropical plants that can be a welcome respite from the harsh cold and dreary winter. Ørstedsparken, just south of Nørreport station, is dominated by a central lake, with grassy banks. The paths are lined with benchs, and when it's warm, the grass and the benches are filled with people taking breaks from work or class to eat and relax. 

Today, these parks are an integral piece of life in Copenhagen. Green space in urban areas has been proven to have numerous positive effects on the environment, including increasing rainwater retention, cooling cities and improving air quality. What may be most noticeable, however, is the positive effect urban green space has on the social aspect of life. Exposure to nature enhances a person's psychological and emotional well-being. Parks provide a place to relax, get fresh air, exercise and connect with friends and family. In Copenhagen, parks and green spaces are utilized to their fullest extend in this way. When the weather is nice, the parks and full of people - myself included - and the atmosphere, along with the fresh air, is rejuvenating and invigorating. 

The English Landscape Garden

18th century England saw a shift in the style of gardens. The beginning of the century was dominated by countless cookie-cutter baroque gardens, and they became something commonplace. That, coupled with increasing feelings of hatred between the French and the British, led the Brits to radically redesign the garden.

This revolution first began with Charles Bridgeman. He was the pioneer of free form landscape gardening, and was a key transitional piece. Bridgeman's landscapes followed an overarching structured form, similar to geometric baroque gardens, but he played with curves within the constructs of a structured garden.

His more naturalistic, wandering designs can be seen in this 1720 aerial drawing of Stowe. While the garden is still dominated by straight lines, the meandering paths it did have were a completely new idea in England at the time. Sadly, many of his original landscape gardens were redesigned by the likes of William Kent and Capability Brown as this style of garden became more popular, and no pure Bridgeman design still exists. 

William Kent was the next of influential persons to work with English landscape gardens. He was many things, including an architect, painter and a gardener. He picked up where Charles Bridgeman left off, and went 10 steps farther. While he was not a horticultural genius, he was a genius when it came to landscape design, and often designed the landscapes and let others carry them to fruition.

This picture of the Vale of Venus at Rousham shows how Kent designed gardens in a way that brought landscape painting to life. He utilized natural forms and colors to create spaces that illicit emotional responses, and this is still true even today in the gardens like Rousham where his work can still be seen. 

Capability Brown was the last great English landscape garden designer. He worked after both Bridgeman and Kent, and began by first working under Kent at Stowe. He created more than 170 landscape gardens for estates and country homes during his career. His style was dominated by sloping meadows of grass, which seemed to effortlessly incorporate the homes into the scenic panorama.

Brown's landscapes can be experienced at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, and in many other places across England. His landscapes were developed to be beautiful to the eye, without the viewer necessarily realizing they were looking at a carefully designed space. Use of hidden dams to create naturalistic lakes and gently sculpted hills elicit emotion from the landscape, and this really is the ultimate purpose of the English landscape garden.

Sources:
http://faculty.bsc.edu/jtatter/sleepwood.html (Bridgewater)
http://www.rousham.org (Kent)
http://www.blenheimpalace.com (Brown)

Why Versailles?

There was one reason the Palace and Gardens of Versailles were built and that reason was to impress. To impress the French people, to impress other nations, and to impress future generations. At 551,112 square feet and 1,977 acres respectively, both the palace and the gardens were built on a scale that was simply unheard-of at the time, and the grandeur still astounds visitors today. 

Louis XIV created Versailles to impress the people of France. As a child, he experienced the Fronde, a series of civil wars that influenced the rest of his life. During the Fronde, nobility rose up against the monarchy and Louis was paranoid that there would be another uprising. To quell his own fears, he expanded upon the hunting lodge that was Versailles - and he did it essentially to distract the nobles from taking any action against him. When he moved the government to Versailles in 1682, he moved the nobles there as well. He kept them busy with the arts and with gossip, effectively creating a social forum for France that kept everyone out of his way. 

While the nobles were enjoying themselves, however, Louis did not want them forgetting that he was the king. And as such, Versailles is littered with allegory alluding to King Louis XIV. King Louis chose the sun as his emblem, and he became associated with Apollo, the sun god. There are Apollo motifs throughout the Garden and Palace of Versailles; Apollo was known as the god of peace and the arts, as well as the god in charge of the rising and setting of the sun. In this way, Louis asserted his power. He believed in the divine right of kings, and he was, metaphorically, the man in charge of the rising and setting sun. His throne was in a room known as the Apollo Salon, and the Apollo Fountain is a huge feature of the garden.

Additionally, Versailles was built to impress the rest of Europe. When Louis XIV became France's sole ruler, the country was not a powerful force in Europe. During his reign, he revolutionized France's impact in Europe. The Palace of Versailles became a physical representation of France's turnaround in the European economic landscape. Louis brought this change to France because in his mind, there was no difference between what was good for him and what was good for France. He was a controlling absolute monarch, but he had France's best interest at heart. These attitudes are exemplified in both the Palace and Gardens of Versailles: their magnitude and splendor reflect what Louis XIV believed about himself and about France. 

Sources:

http://www.livescience.com/38903-palace-of-versailles-facts-history.html

http://www.linkparis.com/versailles.htm
http://www.wall-online.net/wallpaper/basin-of-apollo-versailles-ile-de-france-france.html (Apollo Fountain)

Unusual Gardens of Europe

While most gardens across Europe were developed for traditional purposes and follow common styles of their time period, there are some gardens that break the molds. They are not organized, they were not created for relaxation or functionality, and they are not attached to homes, castles or villas. Unconventional gardens have popped up throughout history: Italy's Bomarzo Sacro Bosco, established in the 16th century, Spain's Park Guell, cultivated in the early 20th century, and France's Jardin Naturel, created in 1995. Each of these gardens has unique features, making them stand out from typical gardens.

The Sacro Bosco in Bomarzo, Italy, is also known as the Park of Monsters. Pier Francesco Orsini designed the garden and Simone Moschino created the sculptures that dominate it. It is a stunning example of Renaissance Mannerism - it pushes feelings on tension and instability on visitors, and this contrasts starkly with art of the High Renaissance.

Sacro Bosco is filled with large, bizarre statues that represent a myriad of mythical figures and stories. They are the primary focus of the park, and a frequently carved out of existing stone. This adds to the mystical quality of the garden and enhances the unusual feeling of the place.

Spain's Park Guell is also a unique take on a public garden. It is located near Barcelona, and it is the site of a failed housing development. The garden is now an expansive display of architecture and modernist design blending cohesively in a pleasure garden. It was designed and created by Antoni Gaudi between 1900 and 1914. Gaudi himself actually lived in a house in the park for 20 years, during and after its construction.

Gaudi used mosaic work and sculpture throughout the garden to create a social atmosphere, as well as incorporate mythological stories and symbols of Catalan nationalism. The park sits on a hill and provides picturesque views of the city of Barcelona.

The most modern of unusual gardens is the French Jardin Naturel, located in the heart of Paris. It was created in 1995 and it is just what the name implies: a natural garden. In contrast with most gardens in Paris, it is not curated meticulously and is not slave to symmetry or any particular structure at all. The garden is free of all human modification and is essentially a meadow in the middle of a city.

It is a haven for birds and insects, and gives the people of Paris the chance to have a little bit of the countryside in their city. Nature has complete freedom in the Jardin Naturel.

Sources:
http://www.parcodeimostri.com/entra.php?lang=eng (Sacro Bosco)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardens_of_Bomarzo (Sacro Bosco)
http://www.parkguell.es/en/portada (Park Guell)
http://en.parisinfo.com/paris-museum-monument/71113/Jardin-naturel (Jardin Naturel)
http://www.linternaute.com/paris/magazine/dossier/06/paris-au-calme/13.shtml (Jardin Naturel)