Gregorio de los Ríos at the Casa del Campo

Abstract

Gregorio de los Ríos publishes his Agricultura de jardines in 1592. The book ambition seems as humble as his author. Gregorio de los Ríos is the Philippe II chaplain and gardener, in the Casa del Campo, in the south east of Madrid. The book presents to the landlords the principles of the « good management » of flower garden. He explains how designing gardens plan and how selecting the plants. This document remains remarkable. It is one of the first European treaties, which by distinguishing the amenity gardens from the nutritive gardens and the botanic gardens, applies the agricultural practices of Ibn Wafid and Abu Zacharia to gardens with aesthetical purposes. Dedicated to landlords and not to erudite, renowned botanists or apothecaries, the Agricultura de jardines is written in Castilian. By selecting this idiom, he contributes to the political unity of Spain and its Empire. He inaugurates a knowledge in which the observation of the nature gives way to the experimentation. All the author savoir-faire—water management, soil enrichment, grafting, etc—is ruled by the experiences, recorded under protocol and results. Furthermore, he confers to pleasure gardens a metaphysical dimension. Giving grace to the beauty of the nature given by God pagans and Christians would have understood this objective of an art which gives sense to human being. With Gregorio de los Ríos’ work, neglected by the historians, it is the Spanish influence on flower gardens, that we aim to question, from an aesthetical, political, scientific and metaphysical point of view.