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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] History of Herb Garden Design
  • Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2009 18:48:26 -0600


A Short History of Herb Garden Design
by Deirdre Larkin, Brooklyn Botanic Garden
http://www.bbg.org/gar2/topics/design/handbooks/herbgarden/1.html

Whatever their design or intent, herb gardens are defined not by their
organization but by the plants grown in them. If an herb is a plant with a
use as a seasoning, fragrance, dye, fiber, or medicine, then an herb garden
is a garden of useful plants. But don't be surprised to find species that
have never had any practical application alongside the useful plants in
today's ornamental herb gardens—some plants are simply too appealing to be
excluded on purely technical grounds. Besides, our habit of dividing plants
into the "useful" and the "ornamental" is relatively new. In medieval Europe
virtually all plants were assumed to have some medicinal value. In the
Renaissance, medicine, botany, and horticulture began to diverge, but they
were slow to part ways and did not really separate for several centuries.

Practical as well as ornamental, formal herb gardens laid out in simple beds
date back to medieval Europe and continue to be popular today, as this
contemporary take on a 12th-century garden attests.

Garden layouts that date back to medieval and Renaissance Europe continue to
strongly influence modern herb gardeners. Though we know very little about
the dooryard gardens of simpler households—the ancestors of informal cottage
herb gardens, in which useful plants were grown close to hand in unstructured
plantings—we do have some knowledge about the structured gardens of the great
medieval monasteries and royal palaces.

The earliest visual representation of a formal garden to survive the Middle
Ages, found on the St. Gall plan, dates to the ninth century. This master
plan for an ideal Benedictine monastery, which was never built as planned,
includes a large, rectangular kitchen garden with 18 beds of vegetables and
potherbs and a smaller square garden with 16 beds of medicinal herbs. This
small healing garden is located next to the doctor's house and near the
infirmary. Both gardens are walled and are laid out in two parallel rows of
rectangular raised beds, each bed devoted to a single species.

This basic, utilitarian design is typical not only of monastic but of other
medieval gardens as well. Enclosed gardens of rural manors and townhouses are
depicted in a number of 15th-century illuminations in Piero de Crescenzi's
popular treatise on horticulture and agriculture, Liber Ruralia Commodorum
(On the Management of Country Estates). They too are made up of a number of
small square or rectangular beds arranged in a simple grid pattern. The paths
between the beds allow easy access to the plots.

This type of plan is still used today in our own vegetable gardens and is
ideal for herb gardens, making it easy to cultivate and harvest the herbs and
rotate short-lived crops of salad herbs and annuals. It is both functional in
form and visually pleasing in its simplicity and neatness.

Not all medieval gardens were purely utilitarian. Unlike the gardens of the
St. Gall plan, the small, private pleasure garden or "herber" was a place of
beauty and refreshment rather than a home for useful plants. In the 13th
century, Albertus Magnus gave directions for laying out an herber,
recommending that the lawn at the center of the garden be surrounded by
borders of sweet-smelling herbs such as rue, basil, and sage. These early
pleasure gardens emphasized elements we still associate with our own
ornamental herb gardens: enclosure, intimacy, and fragrance.
herb garden

Large formal herb gardens were the domain of monasteries, manor houses, and
palaces. Simpler households grew useful plants in unstructured dooryard
plantings, where they would be close at hand when needed for cooking and
other purposes.

Created as teaching gardens by university faculties of medicine, the
burgeoning botanical gardens of the Renaissance favored the narrow,
rectangular beds of the medieval type. In the Chelsea Physic Garden in
London, founded by the London Society of Apothecaries in the 17th century,
the beds still in use today are in the medieval style.

The Renaissance also gave rise to the collector's garden, in which botanists
organized their plants according to scientific principles and plantsmen
exhibited horticultural rarities. Though many new plants were grown, the
gardens themselves remained geometric in form and fairly simple in their
organization, and their descent from the gardens of the Middle Ages is very
clear.

As in the Middle Ages, formal gardens of the Renaissance favored all sorts of
enclosures—brick, stone, wattle fencing, or hedges—to keep out animals and
intruders. Throughout the 17th century, the practice of enclosing household
gardens persisted. Even today, kitchen gardens are often enclosed for
practical reasons (rabbits and deer are with us yet).

During the Renaissance, garden makers went beyond the basic forms of the
medieval garden, organizing the squares and rectangles into more complex
patterns. The knot, with its decorative interlacing bands of clipped herbs,
became a feature of the pleasure garden. A geometric design within a square,
rectangle, or circle was drawn on the ground, and each figure in the pattern
was planted out with a single herb, closely clipped to maintain the design.
Gardeners often filled in the spaces between the clipped outlines with
colored sand or gravel. Elizabethan gardeners used lavender, germander, and
santolina to lay out their knots. Boxwood became the plant of choice by the
17th century and is still the most popular today. Many patterns for these
designs survive, and the knot lives on as the most elaborate and ambitious
type of formal herb garden.
herb garden

Productive gardens remained medieval in character for many centuries, as this
recreation of a colonial garden shows. The idea of dividing plants into the
"useful" and the "ornamental" is a relatively new development that started in
the Renaissance as medicine, botany, and horticulture began to diverge.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, farmers and householders usually mixed
vegetables, herbs, fruits, and flowers in a single garden. Like the household
gardens of the 16th and 17th centuries, utilitarian gardens were essentially
medieval in character.

Late in the 19th century, in reaction to Victorian bedding schemes of newly
imported exotic plants from around the globe, English ornamental gardeners
became interested in "old-fashioned" plants and gardens. This trend had its
counterpart in the Colonial Revival movement in the United States, in which
writers such as Alice Morse Earle extolled the charms of the 18th-century
American garden, with its box-bordered beds and traditional cottage-garden
herbs and flowers.

In the first half of the 20th century, scholars like Agnes Arber reclaimed
the botanical legacy of the Renaissance, and in the 1920s and '30s, Eleanor
Sinclair Rohde helped popularize old English herbals, publishing many books
and articles and designing herb gardens based on medieval and Tudor patterns.

In 1931, after years of study and experiment, Maude Grieve published her
Modern Herbal, the first comprehensive encyclopedia of herbs published in
English since the 17th century. This classic of herbal literature contains
historical and horticultural information on hundreds of herbs, describing
their chemical properties and medicinal and industrial uses. In 1933,
American gardeners founded the Herb Society of America to promote the
knowledge and appreciation of herbs. Its members have created and maintained
many public and private herb gardens.

In the late 1940s Vita Sackville-West relaid and extended a small plot of
herbs at her Elizabethan manor in Kent, England, creating the famous formal
herb garden at Sissinghurst. Though Sackville-West used historical elements
in her quartered design, its emphasis on color and texture makes it an
outstanding and influential example of the modern ornamental herb garden.

Lately gardeners have become increasingly interested in the ornamental
qualities of the herb garden. In the last 20 years the plant list has greatly
expanded as new color forms and cultivars of herbs long grown for their
usefulness have been developed. Many foliage plants that are considered
herblike in texture, form, or fragrance are now admitted to the herb garden.
Experiments with color in the herb garden have also inspired the inclusion of
many purely ornamental flowering plants. At the same time, plants appreciated
for their medicinal or other uses continue to find new homes among more
traditional garden herbs.

This trend may be the logical outcome of the ornamental herb garden's
evolution as a distinct garden type, but our definition of herb garden has
become a little vague—how can we distinguish an herb garden with a mixture of
perennials and ornamental annuals from a perennial garden or a mixed border
that includes a large number of herbs? Perhaps the proportion of useful herbs
to ornamentals doesn't matter. The important thing is to keep growing herbs
and create our own place in a long tradition.

Deirdre Larkin is a horticulturist and historian with a special interest in
the use of historical techniques in restored and re-created gardens. She
worked for ten years in the gardens of the Cloisters branch of the
Metropolitan Museum, in New York City, where she continues to lecture on
plants and gardens in medieval life and art. She is an instructor for the New
York Botanical Garden and a consultant on garden projects and programming to
the Center for Medieval Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She gardens
in upstate New York.





  • [Livingontheland] History of Herb Garden Design, Tradingpost, 08/11/2009

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