UNTIL ABOUT THREE HUNDRED years ago, gardens were sculpted to be symmetrical, manicured to perfect proportions. It was the time that immediately preceded the French and American Wars of Independence; hereditary monarchs and aristocrats held sway over huge swaths of land, and they retained vast contingents of groundskeepers to take care of them. Green lawns didn’t only look like carpets from down on the ground; from a bird’s eye view, a topographical map of the land would closely resemble the kaleidoscopic patterns of a Persian rug.

THE MOST CLASSIC EXAMPLE of geography dissected into geometric designs is at Versailles. By this time, France was now the sole superpower operating in the European theatre; the self-styled Sun King Louis XIV relocated the seat of power from Paris, and commissioned edifice and landscape architects to transform Versailles into a complex capable of containing his entire court. The ultimate exemplar of a totally controlling potentate, Louis’ vision for Versailles reflected his plan for France:  absolute subjugation. People and plants were putty, and life was forced to imitate so-called art.

Gardens of Versailles

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the English channel, William Kent and Charles Bridgeman imagined a new kind of spatial relationship with nature. Bridgeman became the Royal Gardener of the British monarchs, but most of his clients were wealthy Whigs, nobles that opposed the power of the queen. He collaborated with William Kent, the designer who introduced who the work of Venetian architect Palladio to the now-newly-United Kingdom. Drawing on fantastic imagery in pastoral paintings, together they invented a new style of “landscape garden” that became famous across the continent as the eco-centric — as opposed to ego-centric — “English Garden”.

Garden of Rousham House

WHAT WAS TRULY RADICAL and revolutionary about their approach to landscape design was that it attempted to replicate the organic patterns omnipresent in nature, and not the mathematical abstractions of an artificial orderliness imposed from above. Formalized architecture still held an important place in their integrated designs, but it no longer relegated the gaia goddess to a supporting role in her own realm. The humble grotto was elevated to an important position on par with the acropolis. It was still only accessible to the richest of the rich, but at least it shattered the angular orthodoxy of the time.

THE ENGLISH GARDEN became the basis for embellishing a piece of property in the American and Canadian colonies. In the industrial era, there were technological and economic factors that affected how this model was adopted and adapted to the twentieth century; I will deal with these in Part III of Green Grass 101: Clover and Out. And I’ll close this entry with a photo album of Toronto’s best example of a still-existing English Garden, Guildwood Park, at the World War One-era Guild Inn on the Scarborough Bluffs. It’s a great place to take a date on a sunny summer day, a place where the colossal corinthian columns get overtaken by even taller timbers.

OUR INQUIRY INTO the legacy of landscaping begins in Venezia. Today, Venice is a small city in northern Italy that is world-famous for piazzas, canals, gondolas, and, uh, blinds. New York Times writer Luigi Barzini called it “undoubtedly the most beautiful city built by man” (although being Italian himself, he was slightly biased). But back in the day, Venice was an independent city-state; at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, Venice was also the most moneyed city in all of Europe. The navies of Venice protected the richest merchants on the Mediterranean, and the exploits of its native son Marco Polo confirmed its important role as gateway to the Eastern trade routes to Arabia, Persia, India and China.

BECAUSE VENICE WAS at the crossroads of international commerce, both overland and maritime, it was also a nexus for the exchange of information, and as a consequence, a chrysalis of culture. Textual and graphical art forms flourished in Venice: in the late 1400s, it was the printing capital of the world, and the painting capital, as well. Here they pioneered the paperback as a printing medium, and the canvas as a painting medium. At this time, the most affluent families of Venice competed with one another to financially support the most talented artists. One of these, a peer to Leonardo DaVinci, was Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, known colloquially as Giorgone (i.e. Big George). And Giorgione is most famous for rendering what is considered to be the very first “landscape” painting in the Western tradition: The Tempest.

Giorgione "Tempest"

Giorgione "Pastoral Concert"

Giorgione "Sleeping Venus"

GIORGIONE AND DOZENS of others that followed in the centuries to come, like Claude Lorraine and Jean-Antoine Watteau, painted in a style that would be called ‘pastoral’. The hallmarks of this painting style are the idealization of the pastoral lifestyle of the past, of shepherds and their flocks, frolicking in the fields. By this point, the Roman Empire had been in decline for a millennium, and the Italian towns were replete with architectural ruins. So picturesque by pastoral standards meant lush landscapes of rolling hills and groves of trees reasserting themselves in the foreground, pushing architectural elements into the background. And since goats graze on grasses for food, reducing them to fibrous green carpets, the images included closely-cropped meadows as important components in the perfect picture.

Lorrain "Apollo and the Muses on Mont Helion"

Lorrain "Landscape with Apollo and Mercury"

IN THE NEXT CENTURY, Portuguese explorers managed to sail around the African continent and reach India and the Far East by themselves. This meant that Venice’s capacity as a hub of commerce and culture tapered off. But the harkening back to romantic notions of our pre-agricultural past, as codified in the Venetian countryside, were permanently inscribed in the minds of artists on the continent. Two hundred years later, a group of English landscape designers would be inspired by these pastoral paintings, and invent a new style of estate garden that would lay the foundations for what would one day become the dominant paradigm for landscaping lawns in the British colonies and beyond.

NEXT:  Clover and Over Again

Watteau "Embarkation for Cythera"