Tom Turner The Principles of Garden DesignISBN 978-0-9542306-2-3, 45 pages, 130 illus-trations, 2008, 7.50

The eBook explains the 3 classic design prin-ciples: gardens should be useful, gardens should be well-made and gardens should be beautiful. The principles come from Vitruvius. They have influenced the design of gardens since ancient times and are as important today as they have always been.

Tom Turner 24 Historic Styles of Garden DesignISBN 978-0-9542306-3-0, 84 pages, 230 illus-trations, 2008, 9.50

The eBook gives simple and clear explanations of the use and form of the 24 best-known his-toric styles of garden design in the west. The period covered extends from the temples and courtyards of Ancient Egypt to the Modern and Postmodern styles of the 21st century, includ-ing recent examples of show gardens from the Chelsea Flower Show.

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Some of the modern materials used in gardens show every sign of being as good as the old materials: beautiful and durable, like laminated glass and stainless steel. The aging process is a key issue. Lead and stone grow old gracefully. Glass and stainless steel retain their perfection. Copper and lead are expensive materials but long-lasting and capable of developing beautiful patina as they age. Oak develops a silver sheen as it ages. The cheap softwoods rot and stain.

Stainless steel, reflecting vegetation

Greenish glass sphere

Copper fountain Fern leaf in stainless steel

Planting designUse only the best materials also applies to plants. Some good plants can be obtained from the low-price suppliers. But for many plants you need good varieties which can only be obtained from known suppliers, who may be friends or specialist nurseries. They can be varieties you have seen or obtained by mail order or bought from suppliers you can trust to have found the best varieties and grown them with good roots and without pests or diseases.

Planting by Tom Stuart-Smith, with a steel backdrop, at the 2006 Chelsea Flower Show

Green and white: Angelica and Aquilegia

Astilbe and Lobelia

Stipa arundinacea with Achillea Red poppies and bricks, by Denise Preston

Vitruvius and the Genius LociThe ancient principles of design were formulated by a Roman author, Vitruvius Pollio. He applied them to architecture, clocks, harbours, siege engines and other 3-D objects. Had he given more attention to outdoor space, Vitruvius might have added another Roman concept to the list of design principles: the Genius Loci. For garden design, this phrase is translated into English as the Genius of the Place and used to describe the local factors which could and should influence a design. Alexander Pope expressed the principle in verse:

Consult the genius of the place in all;That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;Or helps th ambitious hill the heavns to scaleOr scoops in circling theatres the vale;Calls in the country, catches opening glades,Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,Now breaks, or now directs, th intending lines;Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

This garden is a home for the Genius of the Place (Genius Loci)

A Roman grotto, at Ninfeo di Egeria

An English grotto, at Painshill

Villa dei Papiri (Photo Jean-Pierre Louis)

Use: Space within walled cities was always valuable and expensive. Only the rich could afford small gardens. The poor lived in a single room with a door opening onto the street and no windows. Courtyards were made for spe-cialised purposes, broadly similar to those of the Egyptian domestic garden: outdoor eating, entertaining, growing plants. In towns, they had to be enclosed by high walls owing to the proximity of neighbours and the demands of security and privacy. Walls also created an urban climate, warm in winter and cool in sum-mer.

Form: Three types of courtyard were made:1. a yard (atrium) in the centre of the dwelling giving access to other rooms and to the street. It was a lightwell, a ventilation shaft and a place catch rainwater.2. a colonaded yard (peristyle) ornamented and used as an outdoor living and dining room. The roofed colondade gave access to the rooms and courtyards often had pools, fountains, statues, a small shrine and plant-ing (bay, myrtle, oleander, rosemary, box, ivy, rose, iris, lily, violet, daisy, poppy and chrysan-themum.3. a horticultural space (xystus) was used for flowers and vegetables and might be decorat-ed with statues, a pavilion and a water fea-tures.

The best examples of small Roman courtyards are in the once-buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum - and there is also a re-created courtyard from the Villa dei Papiri at the Getty Museum (photo above).

Classical Courtyard c100 BCEStyle Five

Classical courtyard gardens in Pompeii

Werfen Castle, Austria (Photo courtesy Nathan Wong)

Use: Forts were occupied by soldiers and used exclusively for military purposes. From the middle ages onwards, castles were places for families to live with their dependents and retainers. Some had small pleasure gar-dens within their walls, primarily for the use of ladies, children, swains and troubadours. In times of siege, an army, or the poplulation of the local village, would occupy the space inside the outer fortifications and, presumably, trample the garden.

Form: The garden could be a small rectangu-lar, hexagonal or irregular enclosure, inside the outer fortification (bailey). There are many surviving castle spaces where one can see places for such gardens within the inner or outer bailey. No examples survive but there are symbolic illustrations of them in medieval prayer books and romances. They show trellis fencing, flowery lawns, turf seats, tunnel-ar-bours and a profusion of sweet-scented flow-ers. Most of the land within the bailey would not have smelt sweet. Castles also had or-chards and hunting parks outside the fortified zone.

Castle Garden c 1300 CEStyle Nine

Herber is the medieval word for a planted gar-den (from the Latin herba, meaning either grass or a herbaceous plant). The herber could be used for medicinal plants or flowers. Later the word came to be used for an arbour. Medieval castles had small planted areas within the forti-fications, protected by wooden fences and used as sitting areas for ladies and their swains. Cas-tles also had larger pleasure gardens outside their fortifications.

Ambras Castle, Austria, has a garden re-creation loosely based on old drawings (above and be-low).

Salzburg Castle has fortified platforms of the type once used for gardens in time of peace and for soldiers in time of war.

Marie-Luise Gothein Indian Gardens

ISBN 978-0-9542306-4-7, 112 pages, 260 il-lustrations, 2008, 15.50

This is the first English translation of Marie-Lu-ise Gotheins classic Indische Garten (1926). It is a real work of scholarship and a much more extensive treatment of Indian gardens than in her monumental History of Garden Art. Gothein learnt Sanskrit in order to research the subject.

Gilbert Laing Meason The Worlds First Book on Landscape Architecture

15 pages, 10 illustrations, 2008, 4.50

This book contains the chapter and illustra-tions with which Meason explains his concep-tion of Landscape Architecture. The term was adopted by Loudon, Downing, Vaux, Olmsted and the landscape architecture profession worldwide. The chapter contains engravings of paintings by Giorgioni, Breemberg, Veronese, Mantegna, Julio Romano, Siciolante Da Ser-moneta, Giotto and Poussin.

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Marie Luise Gothein was an outstanding garden historian. She was born on 12th Sep-tember 1863 and died on 24th December 1931. Her 2-volume History of Garden Art was published in German in 1913 and in English in 1928 (with the addition of chapters 17 and 18). It is a masterly overview of the subject, carefully researched, well illustrated and gilded with excellent design judgement.

Gothein was born in an area of East Prussia which reverted to Poland after the Second World War. Her given name, Marie-Luise suggests that her family was of French extrac-tion. This is possible. Many French protestant families had moved to Eastern Germany with

Introductionencouragement from Frederick I of Prussia. His son, Frederick the Great loved French culture and it may be that the name took root in German for this reason. Marie-Luises father was a lawyer named Schroeter. This name derives from the Middle High German schro-taere meaning a carrier of wine or beer bar-rels. The Gotheins lived in Lower Silesia and Marie-Luise went to study at the University of Wroclaw (then University of Breslau) in Silesia A beautiful city on the Odra River at the foot of the Sudety Mountains, it was the ducal capital of Lower Silesia (310 km southwest of Warsaw and 200 km east of Dresden, in Germany). Wroclaw had long been settled by Germans, who gave it the name Breslau in 1261. After the accession of the Spanish prince Ferdinand I to the Bohemian throne in 1526 it became a Habsburg possession. After the War of Aus-trian Succession, in 1714, Frederick the Great took the city. It was natural for a child from this region to take an interest in history. Its turbu-lent history could have made her a conserva-tive but in fact made her a liberal.

Marie-Luise studied History and the History of Art in Breslau - and fell in love with Eberhard Gothein, a teacher and ten years her senior. They became engaged when she was 19 and married four years later (in 1885) when he se-cured job at the University of Karlsruhe.

Though Gothein died 15 years before I was born, I came to think of her as a friend, and almost a relative, when writing a book on Garden history, philosophy and design (2005). I believed I was still following in her footsteps when on my first visit to India. But then I came across the reprint of her book with a note by Horst Schumacher. He reports as follows:

Dr. Dieter Gothein, one of her grandsons has kindly advised me by letter of 7 October 1999: After the perusal of the copies of her diaries of her journey to East Asia, which are difficult to

The Aryans are among the worlds most an-cient cultures. They advanced from the north and gradually took possession of the huge subcontinent of India. Since their literature, became known in the western hemisphere, it has had a great influence on our spiritual lives, which can still be felt today. It is not even remotely matched by the literature of the other two ancient peoples: those of Egypt and Ba-bylon. However, while we are able to read the early history of Egypt and Babylon in stones and buildings, we realise with bewilderment that the fine arts, whose monuments India preserves, belong to fairly recent times. Archi-tecture and sculptures, whose remnants could tell us their history, do not survive from pre-Buddhist India, i.e. before the 3rd Century BC. For a very long time, buildings were restricted to religious art. Temples and other sacred edi-fices were concealed in caves. Early art tells about the worship bestowed on the Exulted One, the most sacred Buddha. It can be taken as probable that the Indian people did not use temples in the days of the Vedas.

The evidence of worship which can still be found is limited to sacrificial altars, which were elaborate in their paraphernalia but which had to be assembled every time they were used. However, the Vedas formed the end of a cultural era; since then, the culture of the Indian people has changed greatly. Not only were the spiritual dominance of the Brah-minic religion and the resulting development of castes hardly known in the era of the Ve-das, the Vedic deities were replaced by other gods. And with the new gods, which derived from local cults, it was less likely that all those centuries before the arrival of the Buddha would have passed without leaving any lasting places of worship or temples. The literature of the Vedic era, which is so abundant in spiritual substance, of course leaves us with hardly any

The Indo-European people who settled in In-dia, and whom Gothein refers to as Aryans, are thought to have come from the Caususes re-gion between the Black Sea and The Caspian. Their language and culture spread west into Europe and south east into India. The extent to which migrations took place is unknown. The ancient literature Gothein refers to is the Vedas. (Images courtesy NASA)

The Rigveda is one of the oldest texts of any In-do-European language. The vedas were com-posed in the present-day Punjab (c15001000 BCE) and inscribed c300BCE after being passed on orally for over 1,000 years.

Chapter OneHindu Influence

around the fragmented mother tree, it would not be physically impossible but even Sri Lanka is ravaged by devastating storms and legend tends to exaggerate, especially with regard to the age of trees. The area in which this tree stands used to be enclosed by a wall made of blocks of granite, whose ledges and escarpments were inlaid with chunam, a ma-terial similar to ivory. These enclosed a very large concourse, which could be entered via four gates of great architectural beauty. Each of these entrances was covered by a canopy-like roof made of ore, which rested on twenty stone pillars, each made hewn from one single block of stone. Part of the closest vicinity of the tree has retained its old structure. The plinth and its ledges consist of mighty granite Plates; a number of steps lead to the base, which is adorned by rich imagery; the bottom step, which protrudes as a semi-circle, stands out. On both sides, kerb stones are deco-rated with bas-relieves, and on the step, semi-circular strips have been attached containing animal ornaments with a mystic meaning, the so-called moon stones, which can be found frequently as steps (Fig.. 4).

Fig 4 Udaipur, Jag Mandir, Palace of Prince Khurram

The tree itself stands on a rather high, cascad-ing terrace; the buildings, which used to sur-round the sacred concourse, lie in ruins; the existing buildings are all of a more recent date.

In India, veneration of the fig tree is however not restricted to Buddhists. It is part of the Aryan heritage. The Epic mentions it as an ex

Jag Mandir, an island in Lake Piccola, Udaipur (above and below)

Gilbert Laing Meason On the Landscape Architecture of the Great Painters of ItalyEditorial Note by Tom TurnerGilbert Laing Meason wrote the worlds first book on landscape architecture and the full text is included in the Garden History Reference Encyclopedia CD, with a commentary. This extract comprises the seventh of ten chapters from Measons book On the Landscape Architecture of the Great Painters of Italy. It is the only chapter dealing with Measons conception of landscape architecture. He invented the term and used it to describe a type of architecture characteristic of the great painters of Italy. The book was published in London in 1828 but only 150 copies were printed, of which 100 copies were sold and 50 were given away. It is not known how many survive, but it cannot be many. The Library of Congress does not have a copy but Harvard University has two copies. Following Meason, the term landscape architecture was taken up by John Claudius Loudon, Andrew Jackson Downing, Calvert Vaux, Frederick Law Olmsted - and then by the landscape architecture profession worldwide [see online text of Downings chapter on Landscape or Rural Architecture]. Measons love of Italy and its paintings is unswerving, yet he also admires the English tradition and the principles of Mr Price. Measons prime subject is architecture, rather than what we now describe, following the phrase he devised for the title of his book, as landscape architecture. His interest in architecture seems to have been inspired from outward appearances (venustas) but extends to the other Vitruvian virtues of firmitas and utilitas. The importance of use and beauty is stressed and he was much impressed by Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight. Measons book therefore provides a firm foundation for the theory of landscape architecture. Meason deals with:

The 1. Vitruvian design objectives: Commodity (utilitas), Firmness (firmitas) and Delight (venus-tas).Context sensitive desig2. n: the placing of buildings in context. As Meason remarks: Our parks may be beautiful, our mansions faultless in design, but nothing is more rare than to see the two properly connected (see below).The relevance of site characteristics (the 3. Genius Loci) to the design of buildings

Please see the Gardenvisit.com website for further discussion of the the Landscape Architecture Profession and the History and Theory of the sister arts: Landscape Architecture and Garden De-sign.

Tom Turner. This extract published by Gardenvisit.com. in 2008. All rights reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention.

[Chapter 7 ]

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE OF THE ITALIAN PAINTERS

It is due to the talents and taste of Mr. Payne Knight to acknowledge, that this work has originated from the following observation of his in the Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste. The best style of architecture for irregular and picturesque houses, which can now be adopted, is that mixed style which characterizes the buildings of Claude and the Poussins: for as it is taken from models which were built piecemeal, during many successive ages; and by several different nations, it is distinguished by no particular manner of execution, or class of ornaments; but admits of all promiscuously, from a plain wall or buttress, of the roughest masonry, to the most highly wrought Corinthian capital: and, in a style professedly miscellaneous, such contrasts may be employed to heighten the relish of beauty, without disturbing the enjoyment of it by any appearance of deceit or imposture.

Plate No. 36. GIORGIONI. We have not been able to select from this excellent painter any other specimen than this plain tower and strong hold, adapted for a cultivator, his family, and his flock.

In a matter, however, which affords so wide a field for the licentious deviations of whim and caprice, it may be discreet always to pay some attention to authority; especially when we have such authorities as those of the great landscape painters above-mentioned; the study of whose works may at once enrich and restrain invention. [Knights Principles of Taste.] We could with advantage extend our extracts from this author on taste, on the choice of situations for a country