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Design for a Princely Water Garden Giclee Print Decker, Paul 24 in. x 18 in. Buy at AllPosters.com Framed Mounted Famous gardens, often with enclosures for wild animals, existed already in Achaemenid Persia. The Roman Emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century A. D. built a villa with extensive grounds in Tivoli. The Renaissance brought about a revival of the art of garden design, as the examples of Settignano, Bagnaia and Tivoli prove. Germany, too, had famous gardens -- often attached to princely palaces -- such as the Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg and the Hofgarten in Stuttgart. During the Baroque, garden design assumed a new importance.
The gardens at Caserta near Naples, with their canal, cascades and groups of nymphs, were laid out in 1760. In France, the famous garden architect Le Nôtre created in 1656 the magnificent park of Vaux-leVicomte (near Melun) with its carpet bedding. Such 'broderie-parterres', together with trimmed box hedges, formed the frame-work of many a park. In Versailles ( 1667-88), the central axis with various ornamental pools and groups of sculpture (Latona-Apollo fountain) is intersected by the great canal. More fountains, basins, temples, open-air theatres, pavilions, and miniature palaces are distributed throughout the park.
The French Renaissance châteaux of Chenonceau, Valencay, Villandry and Chambord, too, were given extensive gardens during the Baroque. There are more famous gardens near Paris and Marly-le-Roy, Chantilly, Rambouillet, St Cloud (with a remarkable cascade) and in St Germain-en-Laye, the latter also by Le Nôtre ( 1673). French garden designers also produced extensive parks in Germany. The most famous of these are at Herrenhausen near Hanover, at Schleissheim and Nymphenburg near Munich (Charbonnier, Girard). Others are the Karlsaue in Cassel and the vast, but unfortunately unfinished, Wilhelmshöhe. Where conditions made gardens in the immediate surroundings of the palace impossible, these were laid out in the vicinity (Veitshochheim near Würzburg, and Schwetzingen near Mannheim). In Vienna, the gardens at Schönbrunn and at the Belvedere deserve special mention, as do the gardens of the Mirabell Palace in Salzburg. Towards the end of the 18th century, the informal 'English Garden' -- asymmetrical and 'romantic' -- gradually replaced the formal, geometrically laid-out Baroque garden. The most famous examples of this type of garden in Germany are at Muskau and Wörlitz.
In England, gardens have long played an important role. There are the formal Tudor and Jacobean gardens, of which Hampton Court with its complete 17thcentury garden is only one famous example, the 'romantic' garden of the 18th and early 19th centuries, the Victorian gardens of all shapes and sizes, and those of Gertrude Jekyll. Often, gardening was a branch of architecture, and the garden designer, perhaps to prevent him from losing caste, was called a 'garden architect'. Englishmen, even great landscape artists like Humphrey Repton and 'Capability' Brown, were proud to be called gardeners. To create a 'romantic' garden or a landscape effect is no easy task. The carpet bedding will be perfect in two months, whereas the trees will only reach maturity in fifty years or more. Again, the carpet bedding will need careful attention, the trees hardly any. The Baroque garden, with all its splendour, contained no animals except perhaps stone ones; but in the English garden the lawns will be grazed by cattle and horses, thus maintaining the contact with living things that makes it so delightful.
Both Repton and Brown stopped at nothing to achieve their effects. Expense counted for very little. Hills were moved to open up views, underground passages were built, small rivers dammed. Everything was to look as natural as possible, without aping nature. English landscape gardeners allowed their imagination full play, yet they maintained a sense of proportion: '. . . every circumstance which marks the habitation of man must be artificial; and although in works of art we may imitate the forms and graces of nature, yet to make them truly natural always leads to absurdity', Repton wrote in Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening ( 1795).
Large-scale gardening was made easier in England by the enclosure of the land formerly held in common. As a result, much of the landscape of southern England was transformed into one vast garden. This pleasing effect was, however, diminished by the Industrial Revolution and by the subsequent spread of built-up areas.
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