36 
House 
& Garden 
GARDENS of SPAIN and PORTUGAL 
Where Are Lessons of Freshness and Informal Charm Which May Well Be 
Studied by Garden Designers in America 
THOMAS WALSH 
“T ORD, I ask a garden in a quiet place 
/ Where there may be a brook with a good flow, 
An humble little house covered with bell-flowers—” 
—thus sings the poet of Honduras, Guillen 
Zelaya, in echo with every heart in which there 
is a drop of southern blood, of Spanish or 
Portuguese origin, of Moorish or Oriental des¬ 
cent. For it is in the gardens of Spain and 
Portugal that the ancient East left its most 
definite touch and, in tracing the history of 
gardens, our steps go straight back to the slopes 
of Damascus and the Persian \ alley of Cash- 
mere among the Himalayas. 
The Spanish Moor, who has been so in¬ 
dustriously praised by tourists largely because 
he was not Spanish, and because they did not 
know how much he borrowed from the civiliza¬ 
tions he had overcome with arms, has, in his 
gardens at least, one indisputable claim. His 
house was the first place where the garden 
entered, so that it might be said to be half 
house, half garden. The streams and foun¬ 
tains ran in and out of their apartments, down 
through patios and courtyards where gorgeous 
lines of flowers redoubled their splendors in 
the reflection of tanks and pools, mirroring 
beauty to the sky and shedding coolness and 
perfume on the air. The Moors had learnt 
from the Persians that a garden must always 
have fruit trees and running water; the trees 
denoting the fact and spirit of fertility and the 
running water to signify the fugitive nature of 
all life. 
P ERHAPS the least altered of these old 
Moorish house-gardens are those of the 
Alhambra and General if e. They clearly 
display their intimate character, the exclusive 
nature of their masters, in the many small 
courts and cypress plots, such as the Patio of 
Lindaraja and the Plaza of the Generalife. 
The Moor understood thoroughly the im¬ 
pressiveness of a great courtyard and an official 
apartment, but, as with the modern Spaniard 
and Portuguese, he held a personal preference 
for the ease and indecorum of private gardens 
where he actually made his home. This ap¬ 
pears in the informal arrangements of his gar¬ 
deners’ craft, where the flowers were ranged in 
unordered profusion and the water glistened 
and murmured, never scattered as in the 
Renaissance fountains, but remained simply 
restful and soothing. The modern visitor 
along the garden terraces of the Alhambra with 
its rose-bowered bastions and ramparts, once 
ornamented with the rare vases and rare 
flowers brought from North and South by Car¬ 
los V.’s gardeners, may fancy that he is seeing 
a Moorish scene, but as a matter of fact it is 
Northern Europe that has given him these ex¬ 
quisite vistas and perfumed resting places. 
When ^ reaches Sevilla and enters the old 
palace of ihe Alcazar, he finds the work of 
the Moor overlaid in the apartments with the 
designs of the Renaissance restorer; he dis¬ 
covers that the gardeners of Pedro the Cruel 
and Carlos V. have wrought extravagant splen¬ 
dors, the formalities of Renaissance gardening 
predominating over the unaffected Moorish 
motives, almost in the fashion of Italy and 
France. For here amid the quincunxes of the 
North, the trimmed boxwood, restrained and 
yet elaborate, the mazes and surprise fountains 
derived from Italy, he notes the abundance of 
water in pools and runnels, the colored azulejos 
or tiles in the channels and basins, the oriental 
kiosks, the memorial cypresses and palm trees 
rising over the tangled bowers of roses. 
M IGUEL UNAMUNO in his Paisajes 
observes that the sentiment of nature, 
comparatively of modern development 
elsewhere, is in Spain still more recent; be¬ 
cause, shut up within cities and walls, her 
people came, perforce, to regard the country 
as a place of labor and exposure to enemies, 
and for eight centuries of conflict had found 
little leisure to regard nature with eyes of peace 
and calmness. Therefore, it is only in the 
ardors of old Spanish literature and in the 
background of her art, that we can catch any 
sense of primitive landscape until the days of 
Fray Luis de Leon (1528-1591). It was the 
great Socrates who said that “country places 
and trees could teach him nothing”; but Fray 
Luis at Salamanca, feeling the touch of the 
divine in nature, held that “It may be that in 
the cities one learns to speak better: but deli¬ 
cacy of feeling belongs to the country and the 
silent places.” 
Throughout Spain and Portugal in the 15th 
and 16th Centuries the task of preserving 
whatever had survived of the Latin-Iberian 
and Arab traditions of irrigation, fertilizing 
and husbandry in general was left to the 
monasteries. From more primitive times, crops 
and livestock had been the special care of 
hermits, and many of the animals of pagan 
civilization that had reverted to wildness were 
re-domesticated through the patience and train¬ 
ing of these hidden benefactors of society. We 
know that in the far Island of Iona Saint Co- 
lumcille in the 6th Century had tended the 
bitter appletrees until they became sweet and 
had shown how barley sowed in June might 
be ripe in August. In war-racked Spain of the 
Reconquest there were no other organizations 
to undertake such works except the religious 
orders. Cruce et aratro they advanced across 
the wilderness, constructing roads and bridges 
for their missionaries. To guide their earliest 
efforts in husbandry and gardening they had 
the writings of Cato and Varro as developed 
in the 1st Century by Columella (Scriptores 
rci rusticae. Schneider, 1794) and in the 3rd 
Century by the Moor, Ibn-al-Awam of Seville 
(Kitab al felalah—Book of Agriculture. 
Translated by J. V. Clement-Walker, Paris, 
1864). They were thus the connecting link 
between pre-Renaissance Europe and the gar¬ 
dens of the Persians and Levantines, who had 
preserved some relics of the vanished civiliza¬ 
tion of Byzantium. 
E ACH monastic house possessed its own 
processes of husbandry, and not only 
were they depositaries of the past, but 
we find that they were pioneers of future cen¬ 
turies. J. K. Huysman in his curious work 
La Cathedrale devotes some pages to the story 
of their lierbaries; and in the accounts of the 
explorers and missionaries we learn of their 
new activities. Great abbeys like Guadalupe, 
Poblet and Las Huelgas found their boticas or 
herb-gardens swollen enormously by the medic¬ 
inal plants that were brought home by return¬ 
ing missionaries and discoverers, specimen 
growths of the Carribean seas, of Mexico, Peru 
and the fertile expanses of Brazil, new prod¬ 
ucts to be tested and adapted to new soils and 
climates. To the alfalfa, which had found its 
last refuge in the Spanish monasteries, was 
now added the little root from which was devel¬ 
oped the modern potato. Through Lisbon in 
1547 first came the acrid fruit from China that 
was rapidly trained into sweet orange of today. 
The Guinea fowl, whose flesh had been the 
food of Roman Caesars, was again discovered 
on the Cape of Good Hope and brought back 
to delight a hungry Europe. Out of China or 
India, to the added joy of the poultry-lover, 
had recently come the Black Zamorana. Gar¬ 
den, barnyard and orchard were conterminous. 
The tuberose was carried from Spain into 
France by a Franciscan friar, and Carlos V., 
on his way from Flanders to be crowned, 
brought to the Spanish gardens the carnations 
for which they became famous. The iris seems 
to be indigenous to Europe, yet we know that 
the white iris was brought into Spain by the 
Moors and planted on the graves to mark the 
burial place of the heroes of the Faithful. 
Today in the sunshine of Sevillan mornings 
one can find in the flower-booths carnations 
from the plains of Valencia of almost unbeliev¬ 
able beauty, and there is also the little dark 
rose, the terciopela, about which one can but 
thrill in silence. 
A great lover of gardens, the Venetian aristo¬ 
crat Andrea Navagero, came early in the 16th 
Century on an embassy to Carlos V. He had 
reluctantly left behind his lovely garden on the 
island of Murano, which was described by 
Christopher Longueil in 1520 as “a very 
pleasant sight, since all the trees in the orchard 
and plantation are laid out in the form of a 
quincunx ,”—the lozenge form which consisted 
in setting trees in a square with a fifth in the 
center and repeating this device again and 
again. The learned Bembo in a letter rejoices 
(Continued on page 72) 
