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The Essential Aromatherapy Garden. Julia Lawless
Читать онлайн.Название The Essential Aromatherapy Garden
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008351854
Автор произведения Julia Lawless
Жанр Здоровье
Издательство HarperCollins
These medieval monastic gardens had a strong sense of the symbolic connotations of plants, flowers and trees. For example, lungwort (Pulmonaria officinalis) was so called because its leaves, which are speckled and marked, were considered to resemble diseased lungs. Sweet violets represented humility, and the earliest of the cultivated lilies, the fragrant white Madonna lily (Lilium candidum), was linked with the Virgin Mary. Above all, the rose was held in the highest esteem. The red apothecary’s rose (Rosa gallica var. officinalis), was also closely linked with the Virgin Mary and with Christ’s blood. There was a widespread cult of planting ‘Mary gardens’, which featured wildflower meadows: today they are echoed in Christian Marian gardens, which use statues of the Virgin Mary together with lilies and roses, her traditional plants.
A statue of the Virgin Mary in a contemporary Christian Marian garden.
jonet g wooten
THE SECULAR PLEASURE GARDEN
The secular pleasure gardens were the domain of the nobility, and later in the Middle Ages became more linked with sensual delight than contemplation of the eternal, as in the monasteries. These gardens were called hortus deliciarum, or the ‘garden of delight’, a scented sanctuary where men and women could meet discreetly in a romantic setting as opposed to the sacred hortus conclusus of the church. Medieval courtly love, as we often see it depicted and described in poetry, was played out in these fragrant pleasure gardens. Much idealised romantic literature, such as the French allegorical poem Le Roman de la Rose (fifteenth century), contains descriptions of a lover meeting his lady in her private, secret garden and, in this case, warning of the dangers of profane love.
… there was always an abundance of flowers. There were very beautiful violets, fresh, young periwinkles; there were white and red flowers, and wonderful yellow ones. The earth was very artfully decorated and painted with flowers of various colours and sweetest perfumes.
(Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung c. 1235–1280, Visions of Paradise)
These secluded gardens featured high trellising, overhung with fragrant climbers (often roses or other sweet-scented climbers) and scented chamomile seats for lovers. Hidden rose arbours became the background for courtly love and romance in a highly stylised setting. They often contained a rose garden and a water feature such as a fountain, or a clear pool. Sensuality rather than spirituality became the vogue and fragrant plants emphasised pleasure rather than being transcendent vehicles to the Divine.
Ironically, according to Sue Minter, Curator of the Chelsea Physic Garden, the pleasure garden was originally a:
secret garden associated with the Virgin Mary. The garden represented her virginity and its flowers and fruits, the flowering of her virginity. It was paradise found, as against the paradise lost of the lost Eden.
(Sue Minter, The Healing Garden)
Clearly though, the sacred garden of Mary had lost its primarily religious connotations, and paradise found appeared to be linked more with worldly than divine love!
Detail of The Lady and the Unicorn, Musée de Cluny, Paris.
Francis G. Mayer/Corbis Historical; Shutterstock
Medieval tapestries also frequently depicted courtly gardens with seasonal flowers growing wild in grass: ‘flowery meads’, which were highly popular in the Middle Ages. These were places of relaxation and romantic dalliance and included all the flowers seen throughout the year. Some of the most exquisitely beautiful tapestries showing flowery meads are those depicting a lady and a unicorn, from the series The Lady and the Unicorn. Here the lady and her maid are shown fashioning a crown with clove-scented carnations or ‘gilliflowers’, which were extremely popular at the time because of their spicy fragrance. Carnations were also associated with betrothal and marriage on account of their potent, seductive fragrance. These tapestries, hanging in the Musée de Cluny in Paris, were woven around 1500 and were known as millefleurs, meaning ‘a thousand flowers’. They portrayed an abundance of sweetly scented flowers: roses, violets, wallflowers, pansies and forget-me-nots. Flowering fruit trees and aromatic herbs were also shown but always growing in the flowering mead, not in formal beds.
THE RENAISSANCE INFLUENCE
In the middle of the fourteenth century, the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio provided a link between the medieval garden and the splendours to come in his collection of tales, the Decameron. In one story, ‘The Valley of the Ladies’, he describes a walled circular garden with a flower-studded lawn (the classical medieval hortus conclusus) with ‘a fountain of pure white marble’. The statue at the centre of the fountain issues forth a jet of water which is circulated in cleverly wrought little channels, a forerunner of the art of hydraulics, a popular feature of the Renaissance.
The influence of the Renaissance, and its revived interest in classical antiquity, which began in Italy in the later part of the thirteenth century, influenced the whole of Europe. It brought with it not only profound changes in thought regarding buildings but also garden and park designs. The basis of this was the classical Italian villa garden in which were found labyrinths, box topiary cut in elaborate designs, water and fountains showing Arabic influence, and pots filled with fragrant flowers. The Italian artist Giorgio Vasari described the Villa Medici, near Florence, as ‘the most magnificent and ornamental garden in Europe’. The gardens of Villa d’Este at Tivoli, begun in 1550 and completed 30 years later, are undoubtedly the most spectacular of the Renaissance period with their elaborate fountains and intricate terracing. But Renaissance gardens were not simply grand statements of ostentation: in the beautiful Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, a giardino segreto or secret garden (a descendant from the hortus conclusus) provided a haven of tranquillity and intimacy away from the vast sweeping vistas of the rest of the garden. In fact the Renaissance gardens incorporated most of the features of medieval gardens: roses, scented arbours, turfed banks, fountains, walkways, hedged walls and mounts. Aromatic box also was used extensively in topiary and for edging and hedging. The Renaissance garden was thus fundamentally the medieval garden within a classical and expanded form.
Common primrose (Primula vulgaris), used as a bright yellow design feature in Renaissance gardens.
Svetlana Zhukova
Sweet violets (Viola odorata), used to fill closed knots of topiary.
Volosina
In England the Renaissance influence led to the establishment of the ‘formal’ garden, which used geometrical shapes to show the domination of man over nature. Early Tudor gardens were characterised by the square knot garden, which was divided into four. Knot gardens had existed in the late medieval period, but it was now with the Tudors and the influence of France, and later in the Elizabethan age, that knot gardens acquired supremacy. These gardens were placed below the principal room of the house or palace so they could be viewed from above to the best effect. They were a vital element of all royal gardens. In 1613, according to Gervase Markham in The English Husbandmen, there were two types of knots: the open knot, which was planted out with aromatic herbs such as thyme, hyssop, rosemary or lavender, then simply filled with coloured earth; and the closed knot, which used the spaces between the knots to display single-coloured flowers, such as violets, sweet williams, primroses or gillyflowers. The knots show a very close relationship with embroidery and marquetry, with the earliest designs