Historic gardens

History and fun facts

French baroque: Versailles

The baroque garden arose in 17th-century France. The most famous is the garden of Versailles, laid out by André Le Nôtre for King Louis XIV from 1661. Everything turns on one long main axis from the palace. Around it lie mirrored parterres, fountains and avenues. The garden showed that the king had even nature under control.

• A parterre de broderie is named after embroidery, because the low box hedges look like stitching. Gardeners such as Claude Mollet made the first ones around 1600.
• Between the scrolls there was often coloured material, such as crushed brick, coal dust or sand, instead of flowers.
• Louis XIV wrote his own guided tour: the order in which you should see the garden of Versailles.
• There was not enough water for all fountains at once. Fountain keepers turned them on just before the king arrived.
• To get the water, the Machine de Marly was built, a huge pumping works on the Seine.

Dutch formal garden: Het Loo

Dutch gardens of the late 17th century were formal, but smaller and more enclosed than the French ones. They often had canals, box hedges, clipped pyramids and many flowers. Het Loo Palace in Apeldoorn was built from 1684 for Stadtholder William III and Mary. The garden was recreated in the 1970s and 1980s from old drawings and can be visited.

• Orange trees in tubs stood outside in summer and went into the orangery in winter. Orange also referred to the House of Orange.
• In the 1630s the Netherlands had a tulip mania: single bulbs were traded for huge sums.
• William III later also became King of England. He had gardens laid out at Hampton Court as well.

Italian Renaissance terraced gardens

In the 15th and 16th centuries wealthy Italians laid out gardens on hillsides by their villas. They built terraces with retaining walls, steps and balustrades, and let water flow from terrace to terrace. Famous examples are the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, the Villa Lante in Bagnaia and the Boboli Gardens in Florence.

• The Villa Lante has a catena d'acqua: a water chain that runs down the slope like a stone gutter.
• The Villa d'Este has dozens of fountains with hundreds of water jets and is on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
• Rows of slender cypresses are still the mark of an Italian garden.
• Grottoes with statues and shells were popular in these gardens.

English landscape garden: Stourhead

In the 18th century English garden designers turned away from strict shapes. They made gardens that looked like an ideal landscape, with rolling grass, lakes with irregular shores, clumps of trees and small temples. The best-known designer was Lancelot 'Capability' Brown. Stourhead in Wiltshire was laid out from the 1740s by Henry Hoare II, with a walk around an artificial lake.

• The lake at Stourhead was made by damming a small river.
• Temples, such as a Pantheon, stand along the walk. They are meant as views, just like in a painting.
• A ha-ha is a hidden ditch with a low wall. Livestock stays out, but your view is not interrupted.
• Brown got his nickname because he often said an estate had 'capabilities': possibilities.

Japanese zen garden: Ryōan-ji

A karesansui is a dry landscape garden. Stones stand for mountains or islands and raked gravel for water. The most famous one is at the Ryōan-ji temple in Kyoto and was probably made in the late 15th century. Monks use the raking and looking as a form of meditation.

• Ryōan-ji has 15 stones in 5 groups. From the veranda you never see all 15 at once.
• The pattern is raked again and again with a wooden rake.
• The chequerboard garden at Tōfuku-ji, with squares of moss and stone, was designed in 1939 by Shigemori Mirei.

Japanese stroll garden

A stroll garden (kaiyū-shiki) is laid out around a pond with islands. A path leads you past ever-changing views. You find bridges, stone lanterns, clipped shrubs and tea houses. Famous examples are the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto and Kenroku-en in Kanazawa.

• Stone lanterns (tōrō) originally came from temples, where they lit the paths.
• A high, round bridge is called a drum bridge. With its reflection in the water it looks like a circle.
• Kenroku-en is counted among the three great gardens of Japan.

Chinese scholar gardens in Suzhou

In the city of Suzhou, scholars and officials made enclosed gardens to read, paint and write poetry in peace. White walls with round gates and decorative windows frame a new view at every turn. There are rockeries, ponds, pavilions and covered corridors. The classical gardens of Suzhou have been on the World Heritage List since 1997; the Humble Administrator's Garden dates from the early 16th century.

• Taihu stones come from Lake Tai. They were prized for their strange shapes and holes.
• According to folk belief, zig-zag bridges stop evil spirits, because they can only go straight.
• A moon gate is a round opening in a wall. You step through it like through a frame into a new painting.

Persian gardens and the Alhambra

The charbagh is a walled garden in four parts, divided by water channels that cross in the middle. The idea is very old: at Pasargadae, the city of Cyrus the Great, there was already a garden with stone water channels in the 6th century BC. Later the Mughals built such gardens, as at the Taj Mahal, and in Spain gardens with water channels were made, like the Generalife next to the Alhambra in Granada.

• The word paradise comes via Greek from an Old Persian word for a walled garden.
• The four channels are often explained as the four rivers of paradise.
• Nine Persian gardens in Iran are on the World Heritage List together.
• In the Patio de la Acequia of the Generalife, one long water channel runs between flowers and small fountains.

Medieval cloister gardens

Monasteries had a square courtyard with a covered walk around it: the cloister. The courtyard often had four plots with a well, a fountain or a tree in the middle. Monks grew herbs for medicine and the kitchen. A famous source is the Plan of Saint Gall from the 9th century, with a herb garden, a vegetable garden and an orchard.

• On the Plan of Saint Gall the herb garden has sixteen beds, each labelled with the name of a plant.
• An enclosed garden was called a hortus conclusus. It was also a symbol in art and poems.
• Many herbs you buy in the supermarket today, like sage and rosemary, already grew in cloister gardens.

Kitchen gardens and espaliers

A potager is a kitchen garden that is also meant to look beautiful. The most famous example is the château of Villandry on the Loire, where the ornamental kitchen garden was recreated in the early 20th century in geometric plots with vegetables and box. In England, country houses had walled kitchen gardens; the walls kept out the wind and gave off warmth to fruit trees.

• Espalier trees are pruned flat against a wall or frame. That gives them more sun and warmth.
• Some garden walls even had flues to heat them in spring.
• At Villandry the plots are replanted every year with vegetables in other colours.

Rose gardens and pergolas

Roses have been grown for thousands of years. Empress Joséphine, Napoleon's wife, collected hundreds of kinds of roses at her château of Malmaison in the early 19th century. After that came public rose gardens with round beds, paths like spokes and pergolas covered in climbing roses.

• The word pergola comes from Italian and goes back to the Latin pergula.
• The Roseraie de L'Haÿ near Paris, laid out around 1900, was one of the first gardens just for roses.
• In Minecraft a rose bush does not grow, but bone meal gives you an extra one.

Mazes: Hampton Court

A labyrinth has one long way without choices, like the labyrinth in the floor of Chartres Cathedral. A maze has junctions and dead ends. Hedge mazes became popular in the 17th century. The maze at Hampton Court near London was planted around 1690 for William III and is the oldest surviving hedge maze in Britain.

• A perfect maze has exactly one way between any two places. Then the hand rule works: keep one hand on the hedge and you always get out.
• The Longleat maze in England, from 1975, is made of thousands of yew trees.
• Computers often make mazes with the same method as this tool: depth-first search with backtracking.