the epitome of the jardin à la francais.
Chicago’s Lurie Garden, planted in the New Wave Style and designed by Piet Oudolf. Picture from 2008.
gardens of the 16th and 17th centu- ries were geometrical, symmetrical and precise. Trees were planted in straight lines and pruned to a particular height to match their neighbours. Tricks of perspective were used to make the grounds look bigger: for example, a tree-lined alley leading from the house might have the trees trimmed shorter as they were further from the house and lane made narrower, making the alley appear longer. Reflecting pools were used to double the apparent size of things. Parterres of low plantings in symmetrical scrolls and geometric designs could be quite complex. The gardens at Louis XIV’s Palace at
The Victorian style of Victoria’s Butchart Gardens. Italian gardens reached the pinnacle of
artifice in the late Renaissance with the mannerist style, as exemplified by the 1552-built Sacro Bosco (Sacred Woods), nicknamed Bosco dei Mostri (Monsters’ Woods), in Bomarzo in central Italy. The garden is full of statues of horrific animals, tumbling houses and ghastly faces, some carved out of not marble but rough volcanic rock. One could enter—and can enter still—a hell- mouth grotto. Having taken the form
localgardener.net
Versailles are the premium example of the style. Building of the gardens began in 1662 and set the bar for gardens of the wealthy for the next 150 years. A couple of new technologies assisted
of Italian Renaissance gardens to the brink, the mannerist style bent it back on itself with an ironic twist worthy of any 20th-century teen. All the rules of symmetry and order were broken with the guiding principle, simply, of break- ing the rules. Formal French gardens
Meanwhile, in France the jardin à la
francais or formal French garden was holding sway. Heavily influenced by the Italian Renaissance design, French
the development of the French craze. New methods of moving large amounts of earth came out of the military’s involvement in contemporary warfare and the need to dig trenches and build walls quickly. This enabled landscape architects to level large areas for terrac- es and to dig canals on a grand scale. There were new developments in irriga- tion, though even with over 200 pumps installed at Versailles there was insuffi- cient pressure to run all the fountains at once. As well,
technologists were Fall 2016 • 53
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