Gardens

Abstract

Gardening in the West flourished in classical antiquity, especially during the time of the Roman Empire, but went into decline during the earlier Middle Ages. Revived along with other cultural forms, fine gardening, created in a great range of size and styles, became a highly important art form during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance through the early eighteenth century, the time period covered by this bibliography. The word garden, and its equivalent in other languages, could refer to a purely utilitarian place for growing vegetables, fruit, herbs, or flowers, or to a botanical garden for scientific exposition and learning. The publications listed in this bibliography focus on aestheticized gardens, and the use of the word garden here will, unless otherwise qualified, always connote that broadly artistic meaning. We are mostly concerned with broader issues of design than with the character of individual plantings. A fine garden, sometimes called a pleasure garden, was intended as a place of beauty, and is distinguished by the inclusion of such niceties as fountains, statuary, canals, outbuildings, parterres, gravel paths, grassy lawns, and hedges. During the several centuries before the eighteenth century, European gardens comprised formal features such as rows of trees and bushes, geometric arrangements around center points, and such unnatural features as topiary (clipped and shaped plantings). Within such overall calculated formalism, both subtle and obvious changes occurred over time. In the early eighteenth century, with the English taking the lead from the Italians and the French, formal aspects gave way to a new kind of natural gardening, called landscape gardening. This bibliography extends forward to the cusp of the introduction of landscape gardening design. Gardening is the only kind of art that cannot travel or that one cannot move to another site. In part for that reason, many garden writers have taken special pride in their national traditions. Following the geographical specificity of gardens and the national divisions that have arisen in scholarly discussions, the lists here are arranged for the most part by nation within the categories of chronology and style. The bibliographies cover regions across Europe, with most emphasis on the taste-making centers of Italy, France, and Britain. This bibliography centers on real, historical gardens. There is inevitably some consideration in the readings about horticultural theory, and about fictional gardens that appear in paintings, poetry, and prose. Such consideration helps to put the real gardens in the intellectual and artistic context of the early times, but the subject of imagined, literary gardens deserves its own bibliographic article. The bibliography here covers built gardens, although in every case the gardens have changed over time, or even disappeared. The literature cited in many cases uses old drawings, verbal descriptions, artworks, and other evidence to convey a sense of the early appearance of the historical gardens in question.