Shapes of Earth and Time in European Gardens

Abstract

All gardens are earth art. Gardeners and gardeners, and landscape architects alike —detach er an area of ground from its natural surroundings and give it a new order of boundaries, interior divisions, and plantings. Often they create sculptured earth forms: the flat shelf with retaining bank, drainage channels, and mounded beds of an efficient kitchen garden; the elaborate step-terracing of the hill-slope villa gardens of the Italian Renaissance; the subtly manipulated planes designed to reduce and regularize variations in slope and level in Le Notre's formal gardens; or the calculated contrasts of rolling landscape with flat water plane in the characteristic English “natural” garden of the eighteenth century.