LITMIR.BIZ

       Tulip, most likely brought to England by the Huguenots in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

      Nataly Studio

      It was largely through the influence of Catherine de Medici, wife to King Henry II, that Italian ideas were brought to bear on French gardening practices at this time. The key to the new French style was the ornamental parterre or garden bed, which was usually fashioned using intricate box hedging. Although knot gardens had been an intrinsic part of the Italian Renaissance garden, the French refined their design using elaborate planting schemes in what came to be known as broderie, since they resembled a piece of finely made embroidery. These were best viewed from above, as were the English gardens of the Tudor and Elizabethan period, but here they were less romantic and more formalised and geometric in style than their British counterparts.

      The first parterre de broderie was made by Jacques Mollet at the end of the sixteenth century at Anet, but the most prominent French garden of the period was the Paris Jardin des Tuileries commissioned by Catherine de Medici. Pierre le Nôtre designed the fabulous parterres nearest the palace, while his grandson André became one of the most influential garden designers in history. It was he who conceived the great gardens at Vaux, constructed on a major cross axis with a central fountain reminiscent of the Persian paradise ideal. Later, he provided the genius behind the gardens at the palace of Versailles, for the young Louis XlV. The Versailles gardens, whose grand formal layout corresponded to the four points of the compass, took the whole of Europe by storm: rulers in Austria, Germany, Spain and even the Russian king, Peter the Great, wanted their own version of Versailles! Le Nôtre’s influence reached as far as America, for Pierre L’Enfant’s design for Washington DC is based on one of Le Nôtre’s favourite themes – the patte d’oie or ‘goosefoot pattern’, describing a series of radiating avenues.

      Louis XIV, the Sun King, was in fact infatuated with all aspects of gardening. At Versailles he commissioned a special potager incorporating fruit trees, vegetables, herbs and fragrant flowers – a project that took over five years to complete. He also personally sponsored plant expeditions to bring back specimens from the New World and Far East. Exotic plants would later inundate the whole of Europe as world horizons expanded over the following centuries.

      The late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw French Protestants, the Huguenots, fleeing from religious persecution and settling in East Anglia, Lancashire and southern England. They brought with them specialist gardening knowledge and many new scented flowers, and helped revive an interest in horticulture at a time when it was waning. They cultivated flowers specifically for their aesthetic appeal and were known as ‘florists’: their aim was to create perfect blooms with the best colour and most fragrance. There were eight flowers in particular attributed to them: the hyacinth, auricula, carnation, pink, ranunculus, tulip, polyanthus and anemone. To them we owe the wide diversity of pinks, carnations, polyanthus and auriculas which can still be found in our gardens today.

      Voyages of discovery now brought new species to Europe, including many well-known scented species such as narcissus and tuberose, which were propagated in the new botanical gardens. The Flemish botanist Charles de l’Ecluse was the first scientific horticulturalist and served as the superintendant of the Leiden Botanic Garden. He cultivated many exotic Middle Eastern bulbs and tubers including hyacinths, irises, lilies, gladioli, sunflowers and especially tulips – changing the face of northern European gardens forever. The ingenious devices and flamboyant designs of the late Renaissance gardens, together with the classical mystique of the medieval pleasure garden, virtually disappeared, for now plants were arranged strictly according to species and genus. The Italian gardens of Padua and Pisa were founded in 1543, and in the seventeenth century two great physic gardens were developed in England: one at Oxford and the other at Chelsea. The Oxford physic garden became a botanic garden, as did Kew, which was also originally a physic garden created in the eighteenth century by the Princess of Wales. Other important botanical gardens were founded in Heidelberg, Montpellier and Paris.