The Terraced Garden
THE furor hortensis has seized me, and my acre of ground here affords me more pleasure than Kingdoms do Kings ; for my object is not to extend, but to enrich it. — EARL OF CHESTERFIELD.
ON first acquaintance with the gardens of Italy, lying in ruin and neglect, you seem to feel a lamentable lack of vitality; but during an absorbing intimacy, while the gardens are studied with an eye to their service as models for our own country, their vitality becomes compelling, and you recognize, as their most valuable quality, their capacity to endure. After two centuries of neglect they are lifting their noble heads to tell us that they are something more than mere monuments; they abound in fertile suggestion. They are beckoning our attention at the right time. The landscape craze has passed, both here and in England, and the true garden, the garden that is private and a part of the home, is now the object of faithful study.
That which was grotesque in the gardens has ceased to interest the lover of true garden-craft. Water theatres, constructed at great cost, — with devices for wetting the unwary spectator, are no longer in operation; statues, so important a part of the Renaissance garden, have disappeared; the vase has been snatched from the pedestal; and the stiff parterre without flowers has little hold upon our modern fancy.
We cannot better select the excellencies of the Italian gardens which we rejoice in to-day than by a brief quotation from Evelyn’s Diary, — an entry made in 1644, when he made his first visit to Italy, and saw them at the height of their bloom. Then it was more difficult than now to detect the vital marks of genius in the gardens, but Evelyn was an ardent lover of true garden-art, and the words by which he expressed his admiration for the Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati could have been said of many of the famous villas; he thought it “to surpass the most delicious places for situation, elegance, plentiful water, groves, ascents, and prospects.”
Evelyn had come from the level lands of England, where quite another type of garden was the delight of those days; a garden walled so that mounts were necessary to provide the owner an opportunity to look beyond his walls. The Italian villas, so wonderfully adapted to the hillsides, with their “ascents and prospects,” went straight to his garden-loving heart, and in his Diary he described them accurately for the benefit of the English people. If is suggestive that in copying too closely the type of another country the English at first erred in laying out their gardens on the north side of the house; and sometimes you see an architect measuring the height of the box borders at the Medici Villa, taking the exact breadth or length of a path at the Villa Lante, or the precise position of a statue at the Albani. That the masters who built these gardens confined themselves to no such binding detail, in the creation of many villas, is the keynote to their success. There is no art where the genius of the sixteenth century has more clearly shown its versatility than in architecture. The villa required not only a house suited to various needs and tastes, and often fitted to unusual situations, but about the house a development of the land to equal beauty and usefulness; and this variety is one of the charms of the Italian villa. No one is going to duplicate the Villa Medici, the Lante, or the Albani; far less the Villa d’Este. After you have enjoyed the various effects produced by carrying the Anio up the hillside and letting it rush through the garden, where it tosses and leaps and sparkles in the depths of melancholy shade, the garden has little to offer, except its charming outlooks, framed by groups of magnificent cypresses, of farms and farreaching vineyards, of distant mountains and near-lying hills, seen
nor, with a water design so beautiful and romantic, although too noisy and turbulent for a garden, does the garden need other marks of genius to make it famous; yet all of them and many others are full of genius. They reveal the inborn faculty of the men who created their works to suit their environment.
Although the Villa Medici is absolutely harmonious, with its deep woodland walks, sunny flower garden, beautiful fountains, fragments of antique sculpture, its terrace with the white marble balustrade, supporting the ancient ilex-wood, its incomparable vista of Rome, with the dome of St. Peter’s against the glorious Italian sky, and above all its noble height and sweet privacy; yet where would one find another Pincian Hill on which to place a duplicate Villa Medici? Only something more than mere copying will bring the best in the Italian gardens to our American hillsides. If our architects, upon whom we shall probably depend for our greatest gardens, feel no warmer fire, no richer thrill of their imaginations, when studying these incomparable country residences, than the cold culture of mathematical and architectural lines and curves, so necessary to their art, then they camiot hope to create such homes as will add glory to our country.
It is not wholly the history that has been lived in the gardens, or wholly the architecture and sculpture, or charm of age and ruin, that leads us again and again to reflect upon them. In order to see them as models, with the vitality that makes them useful to us, we must strip them of ornamentation, forget their wealth of history, and sometimes even transform their architecture; then there is left for our contemplation their “situation, elegance, plentiful water, groves, ascents, and prospects,” or the outdoor art in which they excel. It is this outdoor art, an undeveloped art in our country, which enlightens our receptive minds, and holds us captive to its charms.
Some of us seek the level country for our houses, with its stretch of meadows and fields, or long, level avenues, and to a house so situated, either by choice or necessity, may be adapted a garden of most intimate charm; but many of us have an innate love of the hills, and in choosing a site, only a hillside seems possible; and a hillside demands quite different treatment. To the English we turn for the sweetest model in the world of a garden on a level situation, but to the Italian for the garden of the hillside. By availing ourselves of our opportunities for useful and effective building against our wooded hillsides, we shall not only secure a wood in connection with our garden, a most agreeable adjunct in a warm climate, but we shall sooner enjoy a setting for house and garden.
The vitality of the Italian garden is that part which is least artificial; for the gardens were designed by true artists, who used the material at hand whenever possible. But when a palace and its garden had to occupy an island, as the Isola Bella of Lake Maggiore, which, by strong vaulted arcades extending into the water and hundreds of tons of filling, was prepared for occupancy, then they reveled in artificiality. When you are not on the flowerand fruit-laden terraces, looking out over the blue waters of the lake, and into the heart of the near-lying mountains, your attention is held within. The basement of tlie palace has a series of grotto-like rooms opening on the gardens, decorated to wonderment with pebblework, sea shells, and colored stucco, marble floors, benches and tables most whimsical in design. Although such treatment is not without suggestion and possible guidance to those in search of fantastic effects, or a cool retreat where the water can drip and flow into ornate basins, yet it is doubtful if, with our love of nature, and our growing knowledge of the happy union of art and nature, we shall ever again crave a thing so entirely artificial.
When the Italian gardens are the subject of conversation, an acquaintance will say to you, with justifiable impatience: “Is it possible you like trees cut and trimmed into the shapes of animals, birds, cups and saucers, and other things?” You are glad of the opportunity to reply that they formed no part of the old Italian garden-craft, and then you can add: no more a part of the fine old gardens, built by the famous architects of the Italian Renaissance, than the pergola, which has so captivated our American fancy that we have almost become a pergolaridden nation.
That the architects made the most of their material, and thereby produced an endless variety of pictures without sacrificing privacy, is illustrated again and again in the villas that have fortunately escaped the iconoclastic attack of “progress.” The ornate little Villa Pia with its exquisite oval court of diminutive proportion and delectable privacy, so harmoniously placed in the Vatican Garden, is a gem of the sixteenth century. The great Boboli Garden stretches its laureland ilex-clad slopes from the Pitti Palace, with the famous amphitheatre set into the hillside, to the secret garden at the top of the hill, where, when the great gates are closed, only the inhabitants of the heavens can pry.
In all probability we shall never need a moated fortress-palace like the Villa Farnese at Caprarola, with a cardinal’s soldiers on guard without, and within “noble ladies and their cavaliers sitting under rose-arbors or strolling between espaliered lemon trees, discussing a Greek manuscript or a Roman bronze, or listening to the last sonnet of the Cardinal’s court poet.” It would be difficult to say for what purpose Caprarola invites our attention, except for the wonder of it, the artistic daring of the architect, and his beautiful garden house; but a garden on which Vignola has set his seal must surely furnish material for intelligent study.
Of the Villa Lante, another creation of Vignola’s, — for since there is nothing to disprove it, why should we not have it so ? — volumes could be written and the sweet story be only half told. There are few garden pleasures in Italy that can compare with the delight of following this most beautiful of cascades as it tosses and tumbles in a white billowy stream through the tall green hedges, from one terrace to another, to reappear in the basin and fountains below; there to listen to its soft and infinitesimal fall, so in harmony with the atmosphere of the Villa Lante; there to watch the dark clouds lower, and a fitful sunlight call forth the color of the red earthen jars, laden with the pure pale yellow lemon, brighten the green of the box borders, make the brown gravel walks shimmer, and the fountains glisten, till the Villa Lante is a veritable Eden.
There lies near Florence the Villa Campi, a garden without its house; a fairyland where the imaginative may build such dream-castles as he never built in childhood, — fitting into the silence of the garden, among the statue-nymphs, satyrs, and river-gods, the clipped hedges, the fountains and pools, a model of his day-dreams.
So we could go on from one garden to another; each with its mark of greatness; each with its own charm, its happy individuality; but after hours of exhilaration among the more famous gardens of Italy, we ever come back with joy to the smaller but not less beautiful ones. On the Aventine the gate of the Priorato, or Villa of the Knights of Malta, swings open, and you enter a most delightful small garden. The house stands on a steep ledge, and the secret garden lies close behind it. A beautiful little fountain graces the centre of the terrace. This garden, bounded by the house on one side, and a wall on the other side and the rear, suggests a onestory house with the roof removed, and one whole side open. The tall laurel hedges make the divisions; the vines clinging to the walls the background, which indoors are wall papers and hangings; the lemons and oranges espaliered against the walls the pictures in color; the red earthen jars the household ornaments; the secret garden the chamber or “den;” a crude fancy, perhaps, but one that always possesses you in the small enclosed English garden, which this one closely resembles, except for the terrace that lifts you high above the Roman housetops and the slow old Tiber.
The Princess Ghica, of the Villa Gamberaia, rejoices to-day in a delightful model of the formal garden with its subdivisions; a small garden so arranged that it gives the effect of space, and the various parts happily united in one perfect whole. The ilex-wood, the bowlinggreen, the grottoes; the exquisite green grass steps, leading to the basins of clear water, which reflects the Florentine Iris; abundant verdure, and a wealth of flowers ingeniously unite the old and the new. The terrace, which overhangs the farms and vineyards and the broad valley of the Arno, is the crowning glory. The retaining wall, which supports the grove of ilex, opens like the “green hill” of childhood, and admits you to a charming little grotto-garden, a miniature gray ravine, radiant with tulips in April.
The Italian architects, like the English and the French, built their houses facing the road, giving privacy in the grounds to the inmates. The houses were not built on the hilltops, but into the hillsides. A house perched on the top of a hill loses that delightful setting that so enhances the value of a building, which is, at its best, an infringement on Nature’s title. For that reason art must be carried beyond the four walls, that you may not be overwhelmed by that riotous Nature, so intent upon holding her own; scorning discipline like a growing child, but attaining her most artistic development under the guidance of the garden master; that is, when she must become civilized, and conform, like the rest of us, to community life. Her state of savagery, where she sows or destroys as her mood dictates; where, in the depths of her wilderness, she show s us the great river tearing down the mountainside, or the little brook winding its crooked way through the woods, is another story; her multitudinous creations of wild beauty are still another. We admire and we love her, and we love her none the less, when, coming to dwell at our doorways and adorn the handiwork of man, we demand that she live within proper bounds, and comply with the rules of art. By no means should the domestication of nature lead to an artificial condition that is fantastic or grotesque, but simply to a sane union of art and nature; a union that gives a useful and beautiful indoor and outdoor home to every householder.
The most distinctive feature of the hillside gardens of Italy is the terrace, sustained by a retaining wall, a natural development of the hillside in connection with a house. It would hardly have been possible for a sixteenth-century Italian of any importance, loving the open air as he did, to build a house only; therefore the terrace, which seems so much a matter of form, was a real necessity. To adorn the terrace and make outdoor life more possible in a warm climate, groves, fountains, and grottoes were added; statues found their niches, and perennial verdure combined with the stonework; but there were few flowers.
To the best that the old gardens have to offer, allowing for the ineffable touch of time, we can add a wonderful variety of flowers. Then we have vast and fascinating opportunities in the skillful guidance of water, in which the Roman garden-architects excelled. Our hill-country abounds in streams that we can arrest for a while to supply our gardens with fountains, cascades, and even cool, dripping grottoes, and release for the fulfillment of their destiny. Evelyn, like Bacon, applies “ elegance ” to gardens. What a pity that so good a word is to-day bandied about like any common thief! — a word that should be kept for gardens; for when you have such a garden as the best models of the past can lead you to, you have an elegant garden; one that is “very choice, and hence pleasing to good taste; characterized by grace, propriety, and refinement, and the absence of everything offensive, exciting admiration and approbation by symmetry, completion, and freedom from blemish.” From our chaotic state we may evolve choice country seats which include the terraced garden, possibly with farm lands, even though not vineyards and olive orchards, close at hand; the sunny terrace as permanently built into the hillside as the house; a grove of evergreens, a pleasing play of abundant water; beautiful views, enhanced by skillful trimming and planting; the whole characterized by a restraint and refinement of taste that gives elegance; and above all a house and garden so united that beauty and use shall abide together in peace. If, by the guidance of these beautiful old gardens, we attain this garden felicity, we may indeed feel that the Garden of Italy has a marvelous vitality.