January i, 1890.] 



Garden and Forest. 



fruit-trees and trellised vines on an extensive scale, had flower 

 gardens with intersecting walks and rectangular beds, and 

 brought the water they needed in canals of masonry or wood.* 

 Sometimes a special part of the monastic garden was set 

 apart for medicinal herbs, and here we see the germ of the 

 scientific botanical collections of later days. The Benedictines 

 were particularly devoted to all works of cultivation, and even 

 into England, where the heathen Angles and Saxons had ob- 

 literated even the memory of the horticulturist from imperial 

 Rome, these new emissaries of the now papal city soon 

 brought again a knowledge of useful plants and flowers. 



The mediaeval burgher had at first but little chance to de- 

 velop a love for gardens, yet as soon as he attained to any 

 degree of comfort — in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — 

 his house usually had a small garden in the rear. The noble, 

 during the more unsettled centuries when he was forced to 

 be constantly on the watch for enemies, perched on a hill- 

 top or sequestered in an inaccessible glen, had no garden 

 except his court-yard, where, in Germany at least, a great 

 Oak or Linden usually rose among the little flower-beds. 

 The crusades introduced him to some acquaintance with 

 exotic plants, and then Oleanders, Pomegranates and other 

 ornamental shrubs in pots often stood beside his door. In 

 France the late-mediaeval chateau always had a garden with a 

 turfed lawn, vine-clad arbors, parterres chiefly filled with 

 Roses, an orchard, a vineyard and a fountain if possible. f In 

 England, a writer of the twelfth century, Alexander Neckham, 

 describing a baronial garden, corroborates the belief that ** at 

 the outset it corresponded to our kitchen-garden," yet sug- 

 gests " a certain share of taste in arranging the herbs, plants 

 and fruit-trees." J When Fitzstephen's "Chronicle" says of 

 London, at the same period : "Adjoining to the buildings of 

 that city all round lie the gardens of the citizens who dwell in 

 the suburbs, which are well furnished with trees, are spacious 

 and beautiful," we can understand nothing more than kitchen- 

 gardens ; and even these must have been devoted chiefly to 

 fruits, tubers and herbs, for scarcely any green vegetables 

 were consumed in England before the time of Henry VIII. 



Even kings and princes long lived between walls, and prided 

 themselves upon gardens which to-day would seem ludi- 

 crously small and poor. They make a great feature in the 

 writings of the time, but seldom were more than walled en- 

 closures, with clipped trees forming arbors and connecting 

 covered walks, a fountain or canal, formal flower-beds, and 

 stiff little shrubberies. Childebert, in the sixth century, laid 

 out a Rose-garden for his wife in Paris, probably near the 

 present Hotel de Cluny, where the ruins of Roman baths still 

 remain, $ built terraces and grafted his fruit-trees with his own 

 hand. Charlemagne is considered the first real patron of hor- 

 ticulture, and full lists are still extant of the plants with which 

 he adorned his palace-gardens at Ingelheim and Aix-la- 

 Chapelle. But it is impossible to gain an idea of his work con- 

 sidered from the point of view of art, nor can we discover just 

 what was the aspect of the place in the great Dominican con- 

 vent at Cologne, where, centuries later (in the month of 

 January, 1247), Albertus Magnus entertained the King of Hol- 

 land "in pleasant warmth amid fruit-trees and blossoming 

 plants." fl Some sort of forcing-house is, of course, implied, 

 and therefore the great schoolman is often cited as the re- 

 storer of the long-forgotten art of cultivation under glass. 

 Indeed, his skill in this direction is said to have been one of 

 the reasons why he was accused of witchcraft. 



In this same thirteenth century St. Louis laid out the end of 

 an island in the Seine at Paris as a garden ; and Frederick II. 

 of Germany, wishing to reproduce the delights of his Sicilian 

 home, constructed a garden at Nuremberg which was com- 

 pared to the hanging-gardens of Babylon because it had ter- 

 races supported by arches. Another Parisian garden, large 

 for the time, lay between the Louvre and the church of St. 

 Germain des Pres.|| But more remarkable was the garden of 

 the Hotel St. Paul, which covered twenty arpents of ground, 

 and which Charles V. filled with all manner of living curiosi- 

 ties, especially prizing his cages of parrots. A labyrinth of 

 clipped trees was its chief feature, but when Paris fell into the 



*Viollet-le-Duc. " Dictionnaire de l'architecture.— Jardins." 

 t Viollet-le-Duc. 



X W. C. Hazlitt : " Gleanings in Old Garden Literature." 

 § Andre' : " L'art des Jardins." 



K August Demmin, in" Studien ueber die bildende Kuenste und Kunsthandwerke," 

 says that the banqueting-hall was encircled by fruit-trees, that the tables were 

 decorated with Roses, and Almond and Vine-branches, and that a Vine-arbor 

 spread above the seat of the King. 



II In Alphand's "L'art des Jardina" there is a picture taken from a fourteenth- 

 century tapestry, which represents the regular rows of trees with which this gar- 

 den was planted, and a parterre in which intricate patterns svere constructed with 

 low clipped Box-hedges. 



hands of the English this was removed by the Duke of Bed- 

 ford, and the spot planted with Elms. In all descriptions of 

 similar spots we read of cages for animals, aviaries, fish-ponds 

 and arbors, which by their names recall the features of a 

 Roman villa-garden, but were very different in size and artistic 

 value. How small and simple were the finest of the early 

 northern pleasure-grounds may be read in the enthusiasm of 

 the Crusaders over every garden which they saw in Asia, or 

 even in the south of Europe. Nor did later centuries improve 

 upon them much until the Italian Renaissance spread its 

 influence over the whole of Europe. Even in the fifteenth 

 century, a garden which Philip the Good, of Burgundy, laid 

 out at Hesdin, in Flanders, gained its fame from the puerile 

 surprises and mechanical toys with which it delighted the fan- 

 tastic taste of the time. Of course, however, shade-trees as 

 well as the features already mentioned were always prized, and 

 an old historian mentions the pleasure he felt at seeing 5,913 

 Elms brought with their roots by water to Paris.* The early 

 kings of France had country-houses in the vicinity of their 

 capital, but sought them for the pleasures of the chase, not of 

 the garden. 



The true successors of the Roman artists during the me- 

 diaeval period were first, the builders of the new Rome which 

 rose beside the Bosphorus, and then the Moslem conquerors 

 who, between the seventh and the fourteenth centuries, spread 

 themselves over so vast a portion of the Mediterranean lands. 



Constantine and his immediate successors imitated in their 

 capital not only the buildings but the pleasure-grounds which 

 they had left beside the Tiber, and Justinian, in the sixth cen- 

 tury, greatly improved upon their work. Many of the twenty- 

 five churches which he built in the city and its suburbs were 

 placed amid beautiful groves, and on the Asiatic shore, near 

 Chalcedon, he laid out splendid gardens around the summer 

 residence of Theodora, which were praised by the poets of the 

 age for " their rare alliance of nature and art."f 



By the ninth century generations of luxurious emperors had 

 given the great palace at Constantinople a size, a splendor and 

 a variety which the occidental imagination can hardly realize. 

 Constantine Porphyrogenitus himself wrote a description of it. 

 We cannot restore its arrangement from his words, but we 

 learn that it was a vast aggregate of buildings and gardens 

 with colonnades, avenues, fountains, basins and parterres ; 

 that one garden, laid out in terraces, overlooked a great race- 

 course; and that another, the central feature of which was the 

 famous banqueting-hall called the " Chrysotriclinium," con- 

 tained seven peristyles and eight court-yards planted with 

 Plane-trees. M. G. Van Rensselaer. 



New York. 



Holiday Notes in Southern France and Northern 

 Italy.— IX. 



T T is a difficult task to write an account of such a garden 

 ■*• as that of Mr. Hanbury. I find a pocketbook half full 

 of notes taken there, and I have been making selec- 

 tions from these and again going through these selections 

 a second or third time in order to keep my account within 

 reasonable bounds. Readers may form some idea of the 

 extent of the collections at La Mortola when it is stated that 

 the " Alphabetical Catalogue of Plants growing in the open air 

 in the garden of Thomas Hanbury, F.L.S.," occupies sixty 

 quarto pages ; at the end of this catalogue the plants are 

 arranged geographically — that is to say, alphabetically under 

 each country. A mere glance through this portion shows at 

 once how much each part of the world contributes to the 

 gardens of the Palazzo Orengo. A Systematic Catalogue — 

 published like the last in 1889 — has the plants arranged in 

 families, and so without trouble the relative importance — in 

 numbers — of the various natural orders can be readily ascer- 

 tained. Both lists give, after name of plant, references to 

 either descriptions or figure, the time of flowering at La Mor- 

 tola and the native country of the species. 



Winter or early spring is the best time to see this garden ; 

 then, I have no doubt, the words of Mr. Hanbury 's gardeners, 

 Signori Villa and Verri — both men who not only know plants, 

 but love them — would be doubly true. Whilst wandering 

 from one surprise to another my companion and myself fre- 

 quently expressed our astonishment and admiration, until at 

 last our courteous conductors remarked, "At this season the 

 place is not such great things, but come in winter or spring 

 and you would at once call it an earthly paradise." In its issue 

 of February 20th, 1886, the Gardeners' Chronicle contains a 

 list of plants in flower on February 2d at La Mortola ; the list 

 contained the names of upward of five hundred species. 



* Sauval, quoted by Andre : " L'art des Jardins." 

 t Gibbon. 



