Idea of a garden and the three natures

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NOTES RE: SCANNING: please scan all pages; Fall 09</p><p>Greater Perfections THE PRACTICE OF GARDEN THEORY John Dixon Hunt PENN UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS PHILADELPHIA</p><p>CHAPTER 3 The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures L'industria d'un accorto giardiniero, che incorporando the garden as luxurious display and In l'arte con la natura fa che d'amendue ne riesce una terza France, for example, Bernard Palissy, a ceramics artist, natura. garden designer, and Protestant set out his -Bartolomeo Taegio recipe for a delectable garden that combined instruc- tions for its design and layout with arguments for its It is only the scholar who understands why the raw conceptual purpose; he imagined his intricate garden wilderness gives definition and meaning to the human as a glorification of God's creation, an understanding enterprise. of which by a Protestant craftsman like himself was en- -Aldo Leopold shrined in the design. But it is a couple of Italian humanists who offered I one of the most interesting conceptual handles on gar- den art. Independently of each other, or it seems, Long before any complete treatise was devoted Bartolomeo Taegio and Jacopo Bonfadio coined the to the art of making pleasure gardens, their increas- same term for gardens: a "third In offering ingly conspicuous place in sixteenth-century life at- this seemingly neologistic formulation they were drawn tracted the attention of commentators. Some addressed to that central feature of garden art characterized in the largely practical concerns, like Agostino Gallo in his previous chapter as a special combination of nature and books on agriculture, or the authors of La Maison rus- culture. Taegio was writing in his treatise on La Villa, tique. Gallo discourses largely on the management of a published in Milan in 1559, while Bonfadio was craft- country estate, but also focuses on the siting of a gar- ing an epistle to a fellow humanist in August 1541;4 the den within that estate, on its soils, its planting (espe- latter is the more interesting because it is the most ex- cially fruit trees), and the ornamentation of orchards plicit text for our purposes. and gardens. Charles Estienne and Jean Liebault, the Describing his country retreat on Lake Garda to a French text of whose Maison rustique was published in friend left behind in the city, Bonfadio uses a highly 1564, are also concerned with the whole gamut of life self-conscious and rhetorical style-a medley of hyper- and work in the countryside; but they, too, take time bole and literary allusions, some of which are couched to discuss the compartments and decoration of parterre in at least graphic hints (of fabulous giants, mythi- gardens adjacent to the farmhouse with their knots, cal persons, pastoral dance). But its most sophisticated treillage, and berceaux. ploy is to emulate the ekphrastic mode of the famous Other writers at about the same time as Gallo, Es- letter of Pliny the describing to a friend in tienne and Liebault tried to come to terms conceptu- similar circumstances his country seat in Tuscany; not ally with this new art form. Their theoretical concerns the least part of this conceit, perhaps, is that Bonfadio's mirrored a turn from horticultural efficiency to ideas of correspondent was himself named Plinio Tomacello. 32</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 33 From his opening ekphrastic promise ("I shall de- l'arte, e d'amendue è fatta una terza natura, a cui non saperei scribe to you") Bonfadio seeks to emphasize what is to dar nome. (p. 96) be seen. His ill humor is cured "instantly simply by the sight of this lake and this shore," he writes. "Here you For in the gardens the industry of the local people has will see an open sky, bright and clear, and with a living been such that nature incorporated with art is made an artifi- splendour that, as if smiling, invites us to be cheer- cer and naturally equal with art, and from them both together ful." But- as there-what is seen, the fleeting changes is made a third nature, which I would not know how to name. of light, as well as the smells, are only the occasion or promise of something unseen and permanent ("eter- This is, I believe, along with a virtually identical for- nal light, infinite peace"). In a crucial acknowledgment mulation by Bartolomeo Taegio quoted as an epigraph of the movement from visual to verbal/conceptual and to this a hugely important passage. Though back, Bonfadio writes, "Many things can be seen there Bonfadio's final remark seems casual and the phrase that require a diligent eye and much consideration. terza natura is apparently thrown out without much Thus it happens that no matter how often a man re- thought, I doubt whether anything in this epistle is turns there, he finds new marvels and new pleasures." unstudied; in particular, "third nature" is emphatically The very process of considering or theorizing about neologistic. After he has cited many classical au- what he sees is thus linked to the continuing stimulus thorities, it is at the very least an oddity to hear Bon- of the site/sight itself.6 Not surprisingly, one rhetorical fadio claiming to be baffled or nonplussed. In fact, it strategy of the letter is to claim-in that slippage from is very doubtful that he is floundering on his own: he material thing to mental idea that lies at the heart of alludes-I believe- to a remark of the Roman writer landscape experience-that his words are inadequate Cicero in the treatise De natura deorum, a well-known and that the scenery must be visualized by his friend. classical text that circulated in at least a dozen manu- the imagination of Plinio Tomacello, as that of scripts and had already been printed four times in the Bonfadio himself, is sustained by an array of literary years leading up to these two occasions in which the allusions to Aristotle, Catullus, Lucretius, and Virgil phrase terza natura was coined by Bonfadio and later as well as to a series of images that have literary origins by themselves "Venus in her favourite dress, Zephyr ac- Cicero, in describing landscape, writes of what he companied her, and her mother Flora goes about dis- calls a second nature: "We SOW corn, we plant trees, tributing flowers and life-giving scents." we fertilize the soil by irrigation, we dam the rivers It is two-thirds of the way through his epistle that and direct them where we want. In short, by means of Bonfadio, turning his glance toward the lake shore and our hands we try to create as it were a second nature hillsides, first specifically notices gardens. By way of within the natural world." This second nature is what both hyperbole ("fruitful, happy, and blessed") and the today we would call the cultural landscape: agriculture, invocation of classical precedent ("those [gardens] of urban developments, roads, bridges, ports, and other the Hesperides and those of Alcinous and Adonis"), infrastructures. Cicero uses the phrase alteram naturam, he arrives at local examples: an alternative nature, or second of two; his etymology therefore implies that there is also a first nature. This is "the natural world" to which he refers at the end of the Per li giardini la industria de' paesani ha fatto tanto, che la passage quoted above and "within" which his second is natura incorporata con l'arte è fatta artefice, e connaturale de created; for the Cicero of De natura deorum this primal</p><p>34 CHAPTER 3 nature is both the raw materials of human industry and to the present have generally neglected this view of gar- the territory of the dens as part of a larger landscape; as a result we tend to If I am right about Bonfadio's, and presumably Tae- miss the importance of setting and understanding the gio's, allusion to Cicero, theirs are far less casual ma- garden in a context that is at once topographical and neuvers than appear at first sight: they are placing the conceptual. 14 Bonfadio's intuition of the physical and new art of gardens not only within an obligatory myth- conceptual place of garden art springs jointly from his ological framework but also within classical traditions description of its topographical location and from his of cultural history and explanation. 10 Gardens now take classical reading- a maneuver that interchanges horti- their place as a third nature in a scale or hierarchy cultural and agrarian practice with theory, visual with of human intervention into the physical world: gar- verbal. And in a final rhetorical coda, Bonfadio's letter dens become more sophisticated, more deliberate, and sees the three natures that he has posited as "represent- more complex in their mixture of culture and nature ing" in miniature the history of human than agricultural land, which is a large part of Cicero's from the "wild, hard people [who still live in the moun- "second nature." By implication, the first nature be- tains, who are] made as much of stone and oak as comes for Bonfadio the territory of unmediated nature, of man, and who live on chestnuts the greater part of what today we might (provisionally and awkwardly) the year," down to the "civilized people, gentlemen and call signori who live on the shore." This history lesson con- Bonfadio, indeed, reads the whole landscape, with stitutes the final claim for the "nobility and perfection" its gardens, as exactly this trio of natures. 12 Follow- of his region, which he has been justifying to his friend ing his reference to gardens as a third nature, he re- back in the city. turns to what Cicero would have labeled the second, the world of citrus and olive groves, orchards and "green II pastures," and then to their "enemy" or "opposite"- the "tall, arduous, steep, sloping, and menacing moun- The idea of a series of interventions in the land- tains" that surround the Italian lakes to their north. scape, diminishing or accelerating according to your This mountainous zone of first nature may seem, in point of view, implied by the concept of a "third na- Bonfadio's rhetoric, to be culturally absorbed into what ture," is variously manifest during the Renaissance, but we would now term a sublime "horrify- it becomes especially palpable a century or SO after ing the observer, with caves, caverns, and cruel cliffs, Bonfadio and Taegio. Its hierarchical implications are shelter to strange animals and hermits," its summits apparent, for example, whenever we encounter the ap- threatened by "fiery flashes and fogs in the shape of plication of perspective to garden design or to the giants." But the force and meaning of this mountainous experience of designed landscapes. Though there are zone in Bonfadio's survey of the landscape is its lack of earlier examples of the control of territory through any physical reworking by the cultural forces that orga- spatial vision, 15 it became de rigueur for the Renais- nize agriculture, human habitations, and gardens in the sance and post-Renaissance garden to be established countryside below. along and on either side of a sightline that began in Bonfadio is probably less interested than some other the center of the mansion associated with the garden. cinquecento writers in gardens for their own sake; but Before this, medieval gardens would have been estab- his concern for the territory as a whole is precisely what lished in any location that the exigencies of defense or is useful to us. Modern garden and landscape architec- other building and land use directed (Figure 17). But tural writings from roughly the mid-eighteenth century the Renaissance garden saw the establishment of axial</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 35 FIGURE Bernardo Martorell, detail of St. George Killing the Dragon, tempera on panel, late Art Institute of Chi- strong focal point near the house, at one end of a scale cago. Gift of Mrs. Richard E. Damielson and Mrs. Chauncey of human control of the natural world, the other end McCormick. of which might be wild territory beyond even agrarian intervention. It must be emphasized that the arithmetic of "three lines of sight leading from the geometry of the central natures" is symbolic, not literal and certainly not pre- palace or villa and through gardens where the regular scriptive, nor does it necessarily privilege the third over forms associated with architecture and its decoration the other two natures. It is meant to indicate-after were applied (Figure 18). Eventually this line would the manner of Taegio and Bonfadio-t - that a territory be extended outward, past perhaps less clearly formal- can be viewed in the light of how it has or has not been ized spaces of groves, orchards, or "wildernesses," into treated in space and in time. Historically it may mean agricultural land and even into relatively untouched the gradual colonization and elaboration of spaces for countryside where the axis would usually discover its dwelling. But this temporal process also manifests itself other termination in some distinctive feature of the spatially on the ground, which can be zoned in different topography (see Figure 19). In this way, as we shall see, ways and with diminishing artistry, usually as it recedes the garden's order and harmony were experienced at a from the building. On certain sites these "three" zones</p><p>36 CHAPTER 3 FIGURE 18. Giusto Utens, The Medici Villa of Castello, tempera on canvas, Museo Firenze Com'era. gineers), the fascination with distance becomes marked at this time. And, as Thierry Mariage has demon- strated, this fuels a corresponding concern to under- may be abbreviated or extended, according to the finan- stand and name its component spaces: thus captions to cial and topographical exigencies of their location; their Claude de Chastillon's engravings in the Topographie sequence on the ground may also be "scrambled," for Françoise distinguish between paysage prochain (nearby similar reasons. But distinct, palpable, and meaningful land), paysage contingent (contingent or adjacent land), distinctions, declensions or gradations of intervention, and paysage circonvoisin (the land that surrounds the are clear in virtually every instance. It is this phenome- other types).16 non, not necessarily a particular number of zones in the This organization or perception of space became landscape, which the idea of "three natures" codifies. most conspicuous around the year 1700 in the vogue The seventeenth century was particularly engaged in throughout Europe for engraved views of country understanding how landscape was experienced. Among These Baroque representations are the most writers, draftsmen, and especially professionals engaged eloquent testimony to the idea of three natures (Fig- with the land (geographers, cartographers, military en- ures Different treatments of territory are usually</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 37 0 on the River Dec near the Citty of Chester in the Seat the bomas FIGURE 19. J. Kip after L. Knyff, engraved view of Eaton Hall, near Chester, from Nouveau Theatre de la Grande Bretagne, London, 1724-28. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections.</p><p>38 CHAPTER 3 FIGURE 20. An engraved view of a "princely seat" from Matthias Diesel, Erlustierende Augenweide, Augsburg, Dum- Many writers concentrated on the correct implemen- barton Oaks Research Library and Collections. tation of this axis on the ground. In general terms, as with Leonard Meager, the garden needed to be sited where it would yield "Prospect from your drawn into a conceptual program by the simple device then, it was essential not to curtail that prospect by of a strong axial line that bisects the whole - poorly scaled sightlines - SO Moses Cook demanded, a central path through the parterre, then tree-lined "Do not vail a pleasant Prospect (as too many avenues across agricultural land, often aligned upon doe) by making the walkes too That the axis some conspicuous feature in the far distance. (Occa- existed for reasons beyond itself-for - more than the sionally, as in Figure 21, the juxtaposition of zones is pleasure of drawing a straight line across the land- eloquent enough without the axial sightline.) is clear from much contemporary commentary, which</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 39 FIGURE 21. Count Erik de Dahlbergh, drawing of Skogkoster, early eighteenth century. National Museum, Stockholm. Imperrious, and (I might say) an usurping Sense; can indure no narrow circumscription; but must be fedde, both with extent and varietie." He further notes that the techniques of its establishment: Evelyn's this visual mastery of a landscape cannot work with Sylva insisted that avenues not "terminate abruptly," vast and indefinite On the other hand, a sig- while his "Elysium Britannicum" required a garden nificant extent is needed for us to appreciate the variety walk to be "much protracted by by of forms included therein. deliberate planting or even by trompe-l'oeil paintings The axis, then, functioned both as a physical fea- (see Figure 118).20 Stephen Switzer explained the role ture across the land and as a sign of a more conceptual of these axes in 1718 as relating parts to whole; they perspective. This is expressed clearly if rudimentarily connected the "beauty and Magnificence of the Gar- in the frontispiece to the Abbé Pierre Le Lorrain de den" to the whole Above all, the axis enforced Vallemont's Curiositez de la Nature et de l'Art (Curi- a perspective - both a line of sight and an organiza- osities of Art and Nature in Husbandry and Gardening) tion of things within that sight for purposes of better (Figure 22), a popular book that was issued in Paris understanding: in his Elements of Architecture (1624) Sir in 1705, with five subsequent French editions as well Henry Wotton made one of his precepts for architec- as Spanish and English translations. What catches our ture (and by implication landscape architecture) what eye first is a regular garden, its main feature a cen- he called "optical": "Such I meane as concerne the tral fountain. This "third nature" is succeeded by agri- Properties of a well chosen Prospect: which I will call cultural fields, again designated with the simple signs the Royaltie of Sight. There is Lordship likewise that recall Cicero's second nature-a man plowing and of the Eye (as of the feet) which being a raunging and another scattering seed. Further away the view is termi-</p><p>CHAPTER 3 nated with a lumpish hillside from the bottom of which gushes a natural spring. In the other direction-back - toward the viewer-the sequence is similar: first the ordered garden, then a grove of trees regularly planted (we see only their tops), then the waste ground on which sit two women. It is under their aegis that this whole scene is pre- sented to us. Their roles are announced by labels on the ground in front of each: they stand for Art (including what we would now call Science and Technology) and Nature. Their occupation of a space of rough ground above and in front of the garden answers in some fash- ion to the Muses who, we now recognize, form the group upon the distant hillside. There is more to this rather naive, almost diagrammatic image (as we shall see in the next chapter); but here it is important simply to register that the frontispiece appeals clearly to some notion of a landscape divided into territories in each of which the collaborations of the two presiding figures of Art and Nature will be different. By the end of the seventeenth century, this perspec- tival structuring of our vision of the natural world and man's control over it had clearly become a common- place. And it went along with a related understanding of how such control could be exercised in different in- tensities and modes. Both the topic of physical layout and its related concepts are invoked by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, in his philo- sophical treatise, The Moralists. As a frontispiece to the second edition of his Characteristics (1714), to which CURIO SITEZ DE LA NATURE ET L'ART The Moralists had been added, was attached an engrav- ing by Simon Gribelin after portraits of the author by John Closterman, but the original backgrounds of those earlier paintings have been replaced by a glimpsed vista down a garden out into wooded countryside (Fig- FIGURE 22. Frontispiece, Curiositez de la nature et de l'art by ure 23). As David Leatherbarrow has shown, this image l'Abbé de Vallemont, Paris, 1705. of a garden, where control or geometry diminishes as we move further away from the arcade where Shaftes- bury is standing, seems to be offered as a gloss upon one of Shaftesbury's essential philosophical remarks-</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 41 FIGURE 23. Detail of the background of a portrait of the Earl of Shaftesbury, engraved by S. Gribelin after John Closterman, from Shaftesbury's Characteristics, 2nd ed., 1714</p><p>42 CHAPTER 3 that nature's inherent perfections or characters can be tinct or even overlapped, a varied treatment and use of learned by regarding them first in the artificial world terrain were still seen as essential to designed space. We of a garden where man has cultivated the nascent tax- may encounter these concepts or assumptions at work onomy of natural What Shaftesbury calls the throughout the eighteenth century: thus the approach "several orders into which it is endeavoured to to Bateman's Grove House in the took visitors reduce the natural views" are instituted that the through a farm, down a pergola tunnel that skirted a person "who studies and breaks through the shell" or meadow, where they glimpsed the first flower garden exteriority of the world will "see some way into the in a temple grove; or Walpole, when visiting Redlynch kernel" and appreciate the "genuine order" of the natu- in 1762, responded to its gardens in relation to the sur- ral rounding agricultural Shaftesbury's point could be made succinctly at New design ideas certainly modified the concept of that time because in many contemporary gardens, as a series of differentiated natures-their sequence, for we have seen, the sight was guided down a central vista instance, seemed less crucial than their presence. Simi- that bisected and yet linked in sequence different kinds larly, of course, design developments were themselves of human management of grounds. Indeed, Shaftes- inaugurated as a result of fresh philosophical inquiries bury instructed his own gardeners in precisely these into human relationships with nature. These shifts have terms to organize sightlines from within the ordered been the basis of oft-repeated clichés in landscape ar- garden out into the fields and toward ancient trees that chitectural history that charts a steady movement to- nobody had trimmed: "Only for guiding of Eye ward the "natural." But some aspects of this narrative up that Hill and SO to end of reset Fields where have gradually been challenged, and it now needs to great old Yew Tree stands."25 be revisited. Such reexamination must bypass the ster- ile stylistic dualisms of "formal" and "informal," "an- III cient" and "modern," and "French and English"28 in order to isolate more clearly the topics that guided and Now this diagrammatic world of three natures may continue to guide landscape architecture. would be less significant for a theory of gardens if After the heyday of the Baroque country house views, its scope and influence were historically limited. But the axis became less fashionable and was often elimi- it wasn't. Its significance was certainly highlighted by nated or muted; furthermore, in the work of Capability the fashion for bird's-eye views in the seventeenth Brown, green sward could be swept right up to the century, where visually distinct zones are rendered walls of the mansion (Figure 24), and with its arrival all palpably; and this format for imaging the countryside sense or imagery of gradation of effect across the land- did lose favor during the eighteenth century. Yet even scape could be lost. But, as Mark Laird has shown,2 29 as painters lowered their viewpoints (often to ground our sense of the ubiquity of this design formula-lawn, - in response partly to new attitudes toward the groves, and clumps-must be thoroughly revised; the natural world and partly to new design moves on the immediacies and particularities of the flower garden ground, what is here termed "the idea of the three and shrubbery were maintained, even if now scattered natures" tenaciously survived the cycles of fashion. This through the grounds rather than set out as the first seg- suggests the enduring need for some conceptual for- ment of a scaled artifice. In other words, visual formu- mulation of landscape experience: this was a dual con- lations of the idea of three natures changed, sometimes cept-gardens were best understood in relation to the radically, but its conceptual basis survived intact. larger landscape and, when these zones became less dis- To start with, the mode of landscaping associated</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 43 FIGURE 24. Wilson after Griffith, engraved view of Llanerch, late eighteenth century. National Library of Wales. closed) toward a "first nature" of unmediated scope.30 30 The Reverend William Hanbury presumably addressed such landowners in his 1770 book, A Complete Body of with Capability Brown did not, as has long been the Planting and Gardening: the "eye," he argued, "must accepted orthodoxy, eliminate the older layouts in be carried on to a distance," and nothing should block England. While many landowners opted for the fash- these distant prospects. He advised as to "where the ionable Brownian sweep of green sward right up to the pleasure-ground is to cease, and the pasture is to com- walls of their mansions, as many others continued to mence" (being also concerned that "the lawn must gaze out over some sector of carefully organized garden- always be proportioned to the extent of the ground"); scape near the house, then across orchards, fields, and while in managing the transitions within the grounds, other agricultural land (some of it probably newly en- he was particularly concerned that among the sequence</p><p>44 CHAPTER 3 FIGURE 25. William Tomkins, The Elysian Garden at Audley End, 1788 (photograph: Department of the Environment, London). park; but the modern pleasure garden with its shrubs and exotics [Figure 25] would form a very just and easy gradation from architectural ornaments, to the natu- ral woods, thickets and pastures." 32 Furthermore, the of plantations the "wilderness" (in this case, the garden duration of the Brownian vogue, understood as a blan- feature called) should "have first 31 ket of green sward right up to the house, was remark- Uvedale Price, not usually considered one of Brown's ably brief; probably the shortest vogue for any one style most enthusiastic supporters, actually credited him in the history of landscape architecture was effectively with extending the scale of natures about the house, terminated by a return to sequences of differently zoned even if he neglected its immediate surroundings: "Mr. layouts in the early nineteenth century. Brown has been most successful in what may prop- Even Thomas Whately, the influential author of an erly be called the garden, though not in that part of authoritative exposition of the new landscaping, Ob- it which is nearest the house. The old improvers went servations on Modern Gardening (1770), who showed a abruptly from the formal garden to the grounds, or conventional hostility toward artifice and regularity at</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 45 the start of his work, nevertheless still addressed the of different zones that stretched from human haunts "whole range of nature from parterre to the through "accidental mixtures of meadows, woods, pas- And in discussing how the landscaped site might tures, and corn fields" to "shaggy hills left to rude be distinguished from surrounding territory, as we neglect." Though he may have been skeptical about have seen a fundamental aspect of garden experience, old-fashioned versions of third nature, with their "des- Whately also argued that "the marks of distinction potic" topiary, Knight noted that they had at least not must be borrowed from a garden as evidence of the invaded the "open grounds of nature"; those gardens And in his specific analyses of actual sites had, SO to speak, known their place in the ensemble he repeatedly made clear that the "excellencies both of a country estate. And William Gilpin, in his Three of a park and of a garden are thus happily blended at Essays of continued to identify three zones of Hagley," or that "the park and the gardens at Pains- landscape, even if their order was, like Chambers's, hill mutually contribute to the beauty of the several somewhat skewed: "the park, the forest, or the landskips," in part because around the house there were And the landscape gardener Repton, caught up and a parterre, orangerie, and swayed by the arguments of the picturesque theorists, The theoretical arguments used against the modish came increasingly to emphasize zoned landscapes in his Brownian designs suggest the continuing desirability designs. His last publication, Fragments on the Theory of a landscape that featured what Whately (even) and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1816), was praised found valuable in this "whole range of nature." by the Quarterly Review precisely for its grasp of this William Chambers protested the similarity of Brown's observance of scale and variety: "The very name, the work to "common fields," disparaging a uniformity English garden, suggests ideas of cheerfulness and com- of effects. And however novel were Chambers's own fort unknown in every other country. Indeed the heart- proposals in the "Chinese" taste, he was perfectly enlivening prospect, over the pleasure ground, the park, ventional in his division of landscape into three the woods and the well tenanted farms surrounding unferent modes-pleasing, enchanted, and sublime- the country residence of an English gentleman, gives a which corresponded to the long-established triad of favourable impression of the spirit of freedom and in- three natures that were, in his case, pleasing fields, dependence of its enchanted gardens, and wild As that quotation implies, design was intimately In The Tory View of Landscape, Nigel Everett shows linked with larger social issues. The idea of a varied how objections to Brownian improvements were based scenery was as likely to be advanced in writings on on appeals to "some degree of equilibrium in the land- social and moral matters as in treatises that focused spe- scape, a balance of both scale and equity" (p. 82). This cifically on matters of shrubbery design. Uvedale Price, was especially pronounced in the picturesque reaction another picturesque commentator, attacked Brown for at the end of the eighteenth century.37 A common as- what the latter had called his "levelling Business"; it sumption about the picturesque is that it sought to was a term fraught with political and social implica- replace bare Brownian green sward with "one huge pic- tions dating back to the seventeenth-century Levellers. turesque forest," a misconception founded largely on Its use by Brown to convey his work at eliminating the the evidential weight given to the two engravings of different zones of older estates could not escape Price's such alternatives by Thomas Hearne annexed to Rich- attack on the civil and moral consequences of the re- ard Payne Knight's poem, The 38 But as pression of different natures. 41 Knight tried to explain in its second edition a year later, Those who championed a scale of effects were nu- he was more concerned with a landscape composed merous, and they were not just landscape designers or</p><p>46 CHAPTER 3 FIGURE 26. Anonymous, watercolor of an unidentified house, The British Museum, London (Add MS 5671, 26 top). domain" can be found in Wordsworth's The Excursion (1814). 43 William Cobbett's preference for mixed land- theorists; their variety suggests that the motives were more than simply formal. Thomas Gisborne, author of ("coppices, trees, corn-fields, meadows scapes found room for gardens, fields, and wild places Enquiry into the Duties of Men in the Higher and Middle flowers, neat houses"). 44 More metaphorically, gardens, in S.T. Classes (1794) and the poem Walks in a Forest (1794-96), Coleridge's "The Statesman's Manual" (1816) the skills consistently emphasized the immediate garden around honed by the skillful gardener extend across all zones the house and its extension, not into the Brownian of the estate.45 parkland but into farmed land, after which came "the Visual representations of country houses in the late wilds" that were not subjected to "needless interfer- eighteenth century and early nineteenth century radi- ence."42 A similar emphasis on the harmony of well- cally alter the format of the Baroque bird's-eye view maintained gardens diffused throughout the "whole engravings. The mansions depicted have often been set down modishly in wholly "natural" landscapes, green</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 47 FIGURE 27. Michael Angelo Rooker, Jennings Park, oil on canvas, 1776. Leger Gallery, London (photograph: Prudence Cuming ground. Indeed, some country house portraits, care- Associates, Ltd.). fully scrutinized, provide just such evidence. Michael Angelo Rooker's painting of Jennings Park (1776), for instance, appears to show off the modish grass up to to the very door (Figure 26). Evidence already cited the walls of the house; but, more closely inspected, it may lead us to be skeptical of the actual extent of also reveals immediately around the building slight but such new designs; commissioned portraits of country sufficient tokens of the third - a gazebo, shaded estates may have boasted its owner's hopes and ambi- by trees, an urn on the sloping lawn beside the stable tions rather than any actual layout. But it is also worth yard, and a walled garden in full view of the users of the noting that since the viewpoint of some of these house gazebo (Figure 27). And even the various images pro- portraits is now lower and gives less opportunity for duced of Hafod, that quintessential picturesque prop- sightings across a variety of terrain, we cannot always erty in Wales, reveal - though not in the diagrammatic be sure whether such features did not still survive on the sequence of Baroque layouts - a mixed triadic vocabu-</p><p>48 CHAPTER 3 FIGURE 28. John "Warwick" Smith, Hafod, watercolor, tectural space of the terrace, with its flower border, col- National Library of Wales. umns, and urns, we look down some invisible slope to a grove where what seems to be a fountain spurts into the air, and we then extend our gaze over wilder coastal lary of platform for the Gothick mansion, new agricul- scenery. tural land, and the expected wildness (Figures 28, 29). But enough instances continue to occur of houses set IV conventionally within a distinct series of zones to sug- gest that the idea of "three natures" was not entirely The concept or symbolic arithmetic of "three neglected. J. M. W. Turner's view from a terrace of a natures" is useful above all for its dual reminder that villa at Niton (Figure 30), significantly painted after the interventions of landscape architecture are distinct sketches by the garden's owner, reaffirms a tripartite from other territory and that one mode of intervention view of the natural world: from the orderly and archi- is not necessarily privileged over another. The English</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 49 FIGURE 29. Thomas Jones of Pencerrig, pencil view in the grounds of Hafod, 1786. Private collection, courtesy the Hafod Trust. landscape garden and its proponents and tions" that in their turn necessitate "as many different historians largely lost sight of that essential relativism, plans";47 an engraved plan of Leyton Grange in Essex which the previous generation of gardenists had cele- also suggests an appreciation of this various treatment In fact, the insistence is not wholly lost among of ground (Figure 31). By the early nineteenth century, more practically minded persons in the later eighteenth a gradated scale of interventions had been reinstituted, century. Hanbury in insists on "variety of situa- often for reasons that went far beyond design fashion:</p><p>5° CHAPTER 3 FIGURE 30. J. M. W. Turner, View from Niton, Isle of Wight, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. not leap from our windows into jungles, and steppes, and wildernesses, where the lion and panther would be more at home than the 'lady with her silken sheen. " 48 the Gardener's Magazine urged, "We must engraft upon Here, I must briefly anticipate an argument of the our own romantic harshnesses something that will ac- next chapter, that landscape architecture represents the cord better with the equipment of the interior of our other zones of nature. We must not only understand houses, something like furniture and ornament, and gardens as zones of what is being termed third nature</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures and therefore as being juxtaposed to other kinds and differentiated (regular, pastoral, wild). 49 Thus gardens levels of intervention. We must also learn to see how can be both exemplifications of a third nature as well as gardens from all periods represent within their own capable and sometimes explicitly concerned to display area that scale of natures. all of these zones. A clear example occurs at Wilton House in the mid- There are considerable advantages in continuing to seventeenth century (Figure 32): here the elaborate par- affirm the idea of a garden, of any piece of landscape terre of embroidered beds and shaped trees is closest to architecture, as being one of several available "natures," the house (where the artist stands). Beyond are two fur- even when the prospects into differentiated territories, ther and distinct zones: one, an amphitheatrical space upon which the idea of the three natures was based surrounded by carefully spaced trees and bracketed by around 1700, are virtually unobtainable on modern two elaborate, architecturally shaped arbors; another, landscape architectural sites. To retain this habit of composed of dense groves of trees and simple tunnel thinking has many advantages: it actively discourages arbors, that is cut through by a small river that seems the belief that nature is normative rather than cultur- to follow its natural, slightly meandering course. If we ally constructed, it allows place-making to be seen as curb our modern instinct to lump all of this into one essentially related to its immediate topography, and by contrived whole and instead register three distinctly virtue of its emphasis on graduated modes of media- different treatments of space, we shall appreciate that tion, it urges more subtle adjudications of landscape the seventeenth century was aware of how there existed architecture than the habitual ones of "formal" and different modes or "performances" of cultural control "informal." It therefore seems imperative to experience over natural materials. The Wilton garden, however, and to discuss designed sites as the result of choices does not offer these zones in a 2, I. That made within a structure of possibilities, what I have would demonstrate a strict declension; rather, given termed "the three natures." This will be taken up again what is clearly a design decision to incorporate the river briefly in the final chapter; here, the better to under- its "natural" course through the middle of the gar- stand the interrelation of this triad and the place within den, the zones have been reordered as 3, I, 2. This sug- it of the third (my prime subject), it is worth adding a gests that different handling of natural materials was separate commentary, part historical and part topical, a recognized part of landscape experience and land- on each of these natures. scape architectural practice; it also confirms (what has already been suggested) that topographical exigencies First nature. This is an extremely complex topic, which could readily be accommodated without losing sight of it is neither possible nor necessary to explore fully the essential concept. here.50 It is important only to insist that some notion of And this notion-that the garden could represent a first nature, of wilderness, or of a territory of the gods versions of a tripartite nature within its own articula- seems to have been an essential ingredient in the ways tion of the third not lost, as might be expected, that humans viewed and treated the physical world; it after the Baroque period. For example, designs by Fred- helped them organize their experiences. Indeed, first erick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux for both Central nature or wilderness is inevitably constructed by a given Park (Figure 33) and Prospect Park in Brooklyn in- culture as a means of differentiating kinds of iden- clude within the overall designed landscape the same tity or behavior, or of protecting parcels of territory for scale of "natures" that were laid out at Wilton. Here special purposes. Thus versions of this wild, unknown, again they are not in sequence, but nonetheless clearly or "other" zone could be invoked by writers such as</p><p>CHAPTER 3 David Gansel FIGURE Engraved view of the estate of Leyton Grange, (facing page) FIGURE 32. Isaac de Caus (?), engraved view of Essex, (?) The Bodleian Library, Oxford (Gough Maps 8, Wilton House gardens, late Private collection. folio 59B).</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 53 it COMTE DEPENBROOKE El MONGOMERI de de a de noble du Cicero as places to locate the mysterious and sometimes the divine being."52 Alternatively, many societies have fearful presence of the gods; the Greeks had located made wilderness the place where the wicked, the crimi- their gods on the heights of Mount Olympus- - a spiri- nal, or other outcasts were banished to perish in its tual zoning that seems to have persisted well into our inhospitable wastes. own day, if the extremely belated ascent of this im- For Max Oelschlaeger, the idea of wilderness was posing peak is Likewise, the wilderness in derived significantly from that period of human devel- Christian thought could also be "the ground itself of opment when hunting-gathering gave way to herding-</p><p>54 CHAPTER 3 MAP Scale feet to the i FIGURE 33- Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, map of Central Park, New York, 1870. complex cultures there will even be wide divergencies of interpretation - one person's wilderness is another's backyard. It seems therefore too simplistic to blame all farming; then the need for a second nature of fields human dominance of nature on Judeo-Christian tra- and enclosures isolated and identified the idea of a first. dition - after all, as George Seddon points out, 54 the "Once the agricultural turn was made," he writes, "phi- Psalmists, even the Book of Genesis, celebrate a world losophy and theology sprang forth with a vengeance," of wonderful natural creation antecedent to human and the idea of wastelands, badlands, hinterlands, and claims on it. wilderness was born.53 Conversely, in the twentieth In the late twentieth century, many want to believe in century, once wild parts of the globe rapidly disap- the existence of "true wilderness." Yet few examples of peared or were threatened with elimination, "wilder- first nature survive, as least in western Europe, without ness" areas became valued once again. Different cul- any trace of human intervention. Some of the highest tures will identify the first nature differently; within mountain regions or the deserts might count, but the</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 55 PARK summit of Mount Everest, with its abandoned oxygen ence. 55 Primal confrontations with nature, or what has canisters and dead bodies, is an eloquent reminder of been called the immeasurable, have been virtually lost: how first nature can be colonized (not to say corrupted) "L'avion a transformé la mer en lac, et seule la tem- physically as well as metaphysically. The problem - pête peut nous rappeler qu'elle reste non environmental and philosophical alike- - is that once we Yet set any holder of frequent flyer miles on a single- get there to see, it will no longer be, the wilderness. handed yacht to sail around the world, and (however If we have reached the mountains or the desert, it is skilled a sailor) he or she will experience some palpable, likely to be via airplane or automobile (Figure 34). The albeit relative, manifestation of that "first" nature. very highway and any other means by which remaining Indeed, the idea of wilderness is tenacious, irrespec- wildernesses are made accessible to human presence, or tive of actualities. Wildernesses survive above all in the even to human consumption in photograph or painted minds of people who want them to exist; wholly meta- image, compromise their first nature, drawing it physical as this may seem, the fact that we each con- capably into the second by making it a cultural experi- trive our own idea of wildness and wild places does not</p><p>56 CHAPTER 3 FIGURE 34. Yosemite with car park below cliffs (photograph: Marc Treib). century for Sir Gawain, venturing into the wilderness in search of the Green Knight: mean that the idea of wilderness cannot be realized by different people in different ways. Each matches his or By a mountain next morning he makes his way her idea to an appropriate or feasible actuality; David Into a forest fastness, fearsome and wild; Robertson has explored the different ways in which High hills on either hand, with hoar woods below, earlier wilderness writers had been able to access this Oaks old and huge by the hundred together. first nature, in the process also exploring the viability The hazel and the hawthorn were all intertwined of the idea for himself and various colleagues and stu- With rough raveled moss, that raggedly hung. dents at the University of California.57 For somebody With many birds unblithe upon bare twigs who only knows Brooklyn and Prospect Park, the Blue That peeped most piteously for pain of the cold. Ridge in Virginia could be a veritable wilderness; a per- The good knight on Gringolet [his horse] glides son brought up in Montana will have different expecta- thereunder tions and standards. So it was as early as the fourteenth Through many a marsh and mire, a man all alone.58</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 57 Gawain's wilderness is defined in implicit contrast to awe, and fear into a shared commodity, that in its turn the courtly world left behind him in his search for became part of their cultural second nature and was the Green Knight. One criterion of wilderness is its occasionally translated into designed landscapes. hostility, its "otherness," its ability to bewilder (as the There are many instances of this accommodation etymology instructs). In the Himalayas, the Rockies, of some territorial "other" into familiar experiences. the Sahara, or the Australian outback, some western Oelschlaeger's own instance is the poetic narrative of urbanites would still be bewildered, that is to say, dis- Gilgamesh's battle with Humbaba, the mighty forest oriented, without sense of location or even purpose; god, which translates "the relentless Sumerian en- there is a parcel of wood and wetlands on Nantucket croachment on the ancient forests and the triumph where somebody recently got lost for days, unable to of civilization over the wilderness." But another, find a way out. Petrarch's celebrated ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336, Many, many people at the end of the twentieth cen- anticipates developments within eighteenth-century tury have probably never moved out of a second nature. sublime. His letter describing this event, no less care- So first nature has largely existed for some time now fully constructed (despite its final profession of hasty only as an idea or a constructed facsimile. As we have improvisation) than Bonfadio's on the scenery of Lake seen, Olmsted incorporated within New York public Garda, stresses from the first the absorption of the parks areas that recalled picturesque or sublime terri- experience of high mountains within the cultural tra- tory outside the city; Las Vegas and Disney fabricate ditions available to him. imagery of wild places that is clearly compelling or His narrative implicitly presents the excursus into a convincing to many of their visitors. For those who do hostile terrain 62 as taking him beyond habitual society not know or cannot reach the "real thing," perhaps for and scenery: none of his friends is willing to join him, those who do not believe it still exists, these substitutes and peasants along the way in the valley discourage offer imaginary zones that should not be gainsaid. him from climbing the mountain. When he does, he Just as a highway or airplane, for those fortunate leaves behind tokens of the normal world, the clothes enough to afford the travel, physically connects them and objects that would impede the climb. Yet Petrarch's to their preferred "wilderness," so our very ideas of that affirmation that he wanted to expose himself to the sought-after "other" nature link it to the rest of our mountain's primal nature, to "view the great height of experiences. We come to terms with first nature and it," is counterbalanced by the presence of his brother explain our encounters with wilderness by talking of as well as by the famous gesture, once arrived on the wonder, awe, fear, or distaste. We see it as divine, the summit, of consulting his copy of Saint Augustine's nature of the gods (in Cicero's terms); or we excoriate Confessions. Here he reads and feels reproached by the it as hostile territory and mask it off, as in some medi- remark that men forget themselves in their love for the eval representations; or we are more ambiguous and ac- natural world. In retrospect, we see that the difficult commodate it philosophically, for instance, by labeling and frustrating climb into a zone where "the nature of it the sublime. The switch from locating the sublime things does not depend on human wishes" (p. 174) has not in rhetorical productions but in dur- all along been accommodated to the worlds Petrarch ing the eighteenth century may be explained as part of customarily inhabits; its narration is constantly justi- an effort to make acceptable without diminishing the fied by spiritual and philosophical arguments, including newly available experiences of wild European scenery. citations of authority (writers like Ovid) and typologi- Tourists in first nature could translate their wonder, cal parallels-M Olympus and well as</p><p>58 CHAPTER 3 by Livy's account of Philip of Macedonia's climb of place-making we call landscape architecture. Agrarian Mount Haemus. In more ways than one, then, Petrarch interventions and methods of cultivation were simply can only seem to gain access to first nature through extended into horticulture and the layout of gardens; a second-the encounter with the old shepherd is as but so, too, at least as early as the Roman Empire, was carefully situated in the narrative as is the pastoral val- urban imagery taken up and applied to garden walks, ley in the topography below the mountain. hippodromes, colonnades, exedras, and such like.67 Agriculture was a prime element of second nature for Cicero, as we can see from another of his writings Second nature. Despite eloquent commentary arguing on old age, De In a rosy survey of the plea- that all our ideas of nature are wholly constructed or sures of farming, he expresses joy in both the "natural there is some point in distinguishing be- forces of the earth" and the human industry that cul- tween different kinds of nature that people identify; tivates them. The activities he celebrates-such as irri- even confusions between them are predicated on im- gation, planting, grafting, cattle raising, bee-keeping- plicit distinctions. People who choose to see examples and the resulting variety and textures of "grainfield, of landscape architecture like the Merritt Parkway in grassfield, vineyard and olive yard kitchen-garden the late as uncomplicatedly "natural"64 are de- and orchard" yield produce that is "practically valu- claring their sense of different treatments or versions of able" and "aesthetically pleasing." Farming also insti- the natural world available to them. Even parkland can tutes a world of necessary buildings, enclosures, tracks, be taken to be other than designed: few of the people bridges, "orderly rows of trees and groves." Every- whom Geoffrey James encountered while photograph- thing, in short, that transformed what French eigh- ing Olmsted parks thought that they were "really cre- teenth-century terminology called "terres vaines and ated," and more of them assumed they were "just a vagues" into an agrarian second nature. parcel of nature fenced If that is the response to But we must include urban developments within deliberately landscaped sites, then the confusion of sec- the zone of second nature; these are where a ma- ond nature with the first is even more likely and under- jority of western men and women nowadays choose standable. There is nothing wrong with the "mistake" or are forced to dwell. Cities and towns have their or self-deception, which people should be allowed to own structures and infrastructures that parallel those enjoy (they will anyway). But Cicero's account of a sec- of agriculture - places of government, of worship, of ond nature does recall us to the essential fact that, like commerce, of leisure-along with the physical means the third, it is brought into being by deliberate and of supporting them and connecting them to those who physical human agency. It is only the "first" nature, im- use them in the town and in the countryside. When plied by Cicero's alteram naturam, that can be unmedi- William Penn carved Philadelphia out of the forests ated, untouched, and primal, in reality or of Pennsylvania in the late seventeenth century, he Between first and third natures, the second may be seemed to invoke both urban and rural traditions of seen as a middle or intermediate mode. In most cases second nature: between the Delaware and Schuylkill it probably intervened historically, for that is Bacon's Rivers was stretched the rectangular grid of streets, point about the perfection of gardening and Bonfadio's within which pattern were the plots, yards, and gardens about terza natura. It is also important to realize how of houses as well as the necessary repertoire of pub- many strategies and elements of second nature, devel- lic buildings. There were also five squares, situated oped as humans carved their agriculture and urban de- that all citizens would have equal access to open green velopments out of the first, were invoked in the later spaces.</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 59 FIGURE 35- Agricultural terracing on the Greek island of Patmos, 1990. they lack what we'd call design. The idea of produc- tivity that we associate with fields or orchards has not been translated into a sense of these spaces as sites of Philadelphia's foundation is a late instance of the consumption, where different ideas of possession and emergence of a sophisticated second nature from a dwelling apply.70 They have not yet advanced into what first (or what the early colonists deemed to be a first). is here being termed "third nature," or what William More rudimentary reasons of survival dictated earlier Mason in the eighteenth century explained as "the soil, and more primitive maneuvers of this sort: woods were already tam'd, [being given] its finish'd cleared for building and for farmland; walls would have We largely live in a world of second nature, places been erected to protect crops within fields or to keep where humans have made over the environment for the penned animals from escaping; hillsides were terraced purposes of survival and habitation, where labor and to grow crops. 69 These manifestations of a second na- productivity dominate, and where the traces of that ture are clearly the beginnings of an activity similar to work are everywhere visible. But there are some ex- the place-making that we call gardens. However, these amples of second nature that are more slight and/or agricultural sites (Figures 35, 36) have little scope and temporary even than fields and walls. They may not in- variety of internal organization; although deliberate, volve actual intervention upon the land, although they</p><p>60 CHAPTER 3 FIGURE 36. Head of Langdale Valley, the English Lake District, 1960s. which they could exist and feel secure during the night. But if the pole was accidentally broken, their world literally fell 72 A comparable, yet more perma- certainly envisage some modification of it in the mind's nent gesture by which space is marked and protected eye. They all share a recognition of some space as spe- is the standing stones known in the Breton language as cial, as crucially different from surrounding first nature. place markers.73 And the permanence of the stone has It may even be marked off from it in some (often im- its organic equivalent in the tree that occupies a spe- perceptible) way, though without the complexity and cial place in Greek and Ottoman villages, marking the complication of intervention that characterizes most center and innermost space of community; this cen- landscape architecture. A few instances of this will help tral tree is, of course, endlessly repeated in the smaller us approach the main topic, third nature. units of family compounds where subsidiary spaces are Australian aborigines tell of ancestors who always maintained. A final instance of this cultural control of carried a pole, which they set up at nightfall to mark territory, even though we cannot be certain of their the center of their temporary world; they thus iden- full implications, are the geoglyphs or land markings tified an invisible but nonetheless crucial space within of South America (Figure 37): far more than astro-</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 61 FIGURE 37 Nasca lines, Peru. pole, stone, or tree. Another aborigine perception of shape and space in the Australian landscape has been nomical (if that is what they are), these huge workings narrated in Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines: of the earth are a cultural and ideological colonization of first nature, marking out a space of second nature He went on to explain how each totemic ancestor, while by which early civilizations could accommodate them- travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered selves to their a trail of words and musical notes along the lines of his foot- There are forms of second nature where the human prints, and how these Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as intervention is still more residual and does not involve, "ways" of communication between the most far-flung tribes. in the first instance at least, even marking the land with "A song," he said, "was both map and direction-finder.</p><p>62 CHAPTER 3 Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way The sense of sites as ineluctably special continues to across country." be part of contemporary human experience. It is an "And would a man on 'Walkabout' always be travelling instinct that does not belong exclusively to what we down one of the Songlines?" would call "religious" people. This may raise the ques- "In the old days, yes," he agreed. "Nowadays, they go by tion of whether such privileging of place transfigures a train or car."75 site into first or third nature-does it make it divine territory or something like a garden? It can presumably These songlines mark and define the land and its cul- be either or both: if some deliberate and formal inter- tural spaces without utilizing anything so palpable, or vention is attempted (i.e., invoking forms not available as fragile, as a pole; unlike the use of the pole, song- on-site), then it certainly aspires to landscape architec- lines lay their "interlocking network of 'lines' or ways ture. A garden has the status for some people today of permanently across the landscape-perma- a sacred spot. The passions aroused by a dedication to nently, that is, while the songs are retained in aborigine the natural environment and/or by the activity of gar- memory ("if the songs are forgotten, the land itself will dening suggest to how fundamental and "religious" an experience each of these activities gives access. Much In an aggressively rationalist and pragmatic world, modern place-making calls up a deeper sense of the such recognition of what is essentially sacred space or noumenous than we generally care to acknowledge, and sacred markings of otherwise hostile terrain may seem it brings to the recognition of something special in a at best unavailable to us, if not at worst plain naiveté. place a far greater wealth of cultural resources than It would be wrong to think It is worth registering at we have so far encountered in the aboriginal pole, the this point that there is a long history of isolating sites in Ottoman tree, or even the geoglyphs and songlines. first nature as significant, thereby reconstituting them as having a more cultural, controlled status. Some, like V the aborigine territories, are extensive; others, like their campsites, can be finite and temporary. Each is made Third nature. As this phrase was coined by Bon- special and sacred, yet none enjoys the physical elabo- fadio and Taegio, it referred to villa gardens. It may ration and complexity that we have come to associate usefully be extended to describe, as was implicit in with the third nature of gardens. Bonfadio's letter anyway, those human interventions Mircea Eliade has shown that homo religiosus learned that go beyond what is required by the necessities or very early that some ground was marked out as sacred, practice of agriculture or urban settlement (i.e., Ci- and this required no activity on his part except a sympa- cero's second nature). Several extra elements would be thetic reception of that very The Bible articulates involved here: the specific intention (of the creator, but famous examples of this hierography, including the rec- sometimes of the perceiver, visitor, or consumer, how- ognition of sacred mystery in a specific place: Moses is ever we want to call him/her);78 some relative elabo- told by God not to approach-"Put off thy shoes from ration of formal ingredients above functional needs;75 off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy some conjunction of metaphysical experience with phy- ground" (Exodus 3:5). And Jacob dreams that a ladder sical forms, specifically some aesthetic endeavor-the ascends into heaven from the place where he is sleeping wish or need to make a site beautiful. and that God tells him, "The land whereon thou liest, Several of the gestures explored in the previous dis- to thee will I give it, and to thy seed" (Genesis 28:13). cussion of second nature contribute arguably to this</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 63 profile: spaces created around the aboriginal pole or the view of the territory he describes in his letter presents Ottoman tree, geoglyphs, songlines, and other hierog- it as a history of civilization in miniature, with third raphies all move toward, without achieving, third na- nature at its climax. In Daniel Defoe's tendentious ture. Landscape architecture can often be a special, if parable of civilization, though Robinson Crusoe never largely unregarded, case of hierography. The garden, achieves anything he would call a garden, once he especially, is prime territory for this kind of experience has established his house with its "cellar," enclosures by its often complex materializing of sacred place and fenced against the "wilderness," a "castle," as well as a rituals. By deliberate and physical intervention on some "country-house" to go with his "sea-coast-house," he specific site, a genius loci is either recognized or cre- does create a "bower" in the "country" and discovers ated (both recognition and creation involve a subject, what he calls a "grotto" at the seaside. 83 though the former supposes an independent, a priori Garden territory necessitates a more concentrated ef- object). fort of implementation and maintenance than do, say, Gardens may be created directly within the primal orchards and vegetable gardens, which in their turn wilderness, an action that pilgrims and Puritans in the may require more involvement, activity, and perhaps New World took as a metaphor when they claimed to even a sense of ordering than do fields. In Ming cul- establish the re-reformed church as a garden in the ture, the garden [yuan] stood in formal opposition to wilderness of a new But more usually gardens field [tian] above all in respect of its coherence; by are extrapolated from and elaborated out of the vari- contrast, agricultural land was scattered. 84 Examples of ous forms of second nature, urban and agricultural. third nature display a concentration of effort and will, Consequently, as Francis Bacon noted, garden-making a cohesion, and an appeal to notions of beauty enter- followed upon building: "When Ages grow to Civility tained either by their contemporaries or their succeed- and Elegancie, Men come to Build Stately, sooner than ing visitors. to Garden Finely: As if Gardening were the Greater Anyone who has driven through the Val d'Orcia in Perfection." 81 This tardiness of "fine" gardening in southern Tuscany (Figure 38) will be struck by a beauty the cultural process has many explanations. The first of organization that, while not wholly imposed, is in- is obviously a preliminary need for shelter, the human herent in the process of its cultivation and comes close instinct to establish that part of a habitat first. Then to rendering these fields as elaborate and intense an ex- sufficient ground that can be spared from other life- perience as the finest garden.8 Such a reaction to the sustaining functions needs to be available. It also takes Val d'Orcia will derive in part from its modern visitors' more leisure and more technical skill to create, main- reading their expectations of gardens into its agrarian tain, and use gardens. Given, too, that gardens are scenery; what ultimately prevents accepting the terri- private or privileged enclaves set off against a public tory as a garden is presumably its large extent, its nec- world always seems a contradiction in essary lack of any holistic design, and the confidence of terms), then society has to develop a sufficient com- an overall intention at any point or points of its evolu- plexity for there to be desire and occasions for with- tion. drawal from it into gardens. Clearly, we must accept a sliding scale of cultural Despite James C. Rose's mockery of "serious" books intervention in the natural world, a scale which moves -like cite Bacon's it is un- from a residual second nature, where labor and pro- deniable that gardens are likely to be established as ductivity dominate, through a minimalist yet recog- societies become more developed. Bonfadio's final over- nizable third nature, to full and sophisticated enclo-</p><p>FIGURE 38. View in the Val d'Orcia, southern Tuscany, 1998. dener's Calendar of 1806, where "pleasure-grounds" are first given a prominent role.87 Yet this did not mean sures that we are used to calling "pleasure gardens" that settlers had lost touch with the idea of a sliding and that Robinson Crusoe, pragmatic a survivor, scale of natures, where wilderness slipped into field and never got round to allowing himself. There are many orchard into garden. John Cotton of Boston, expound- instances of the interpenetration or porousness of these ing on the Canticles in 1642, explained, "All the world is two natures, perhaps significant of the cultural moment a wildernesse, or at least a wilde field; only, the Church of their creation.86 The early literature of gardening is God's garden or orchard."88 in the territories that became the United States also Nor does this late development of the American plea- makes it clear that there was little time for the luxury sure garden mean that beauty had not been previously of some gardening left behind in Europe: after agricul- identified in agricultural work. In the early publica- ture, only kitchen and physic gardens feature promi- tions on horticulture in the American colonies, there nently in the literature until M'Mahon's American Gar- was little time or concern for what would only later</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 65 be called ornament; yet some colonists insisted on the ness. There are the hunting parks of ancient China in ornamental aspect of certain necessary agrarian func- the Warring States Period that grew out of a tradi- tions- thus, the mulberry tree which "in addition to tion for sacred precincts. Or we have some eloquent serving as food for the silkworm, was useful for its tim- images of gardens set like precious jewels in the in- ber, as hedging, and 'worth planting for shade, orna- hospitable world of desert or mountainscape: there are ment, and oasis gardens, resolutely watered and kept green against Nor should we assume that early examples of land- the aridity of surrounding sand, or tiny walled enclo- scape architecture did not elicit aesthetic appreciation, sures betraying their presence in the red-brown Sinai even if the science of aesthetics was of a later invention. Desert with the tell-tale green fingers of their cypresses The Renaissance botanical garden (see Figures 58, 59, (Figure 39). These last remind us of the Hebrew ety- 61) would have been no less delightful and pleasurable mology of gan (garden), which shares roots with verbs to its visitors because it served a practical, scientific for defense-hence the protected space of gardens - purpose. 90 Similarly, we know that the Mughal emperor and for deliverance-with the implication of giving Babur, whenever he talked of gardens, "made little dis- They also recall the Koran's contrast between tinction between ornamental and economic the desert of its prophet and the deliverance of the And in those great hunting preserves that Assyrian faithful into the cool shade of kings carved out of the desert-one of the earliest ex- In North America, too, there are striking examples of amples of a landscape garden, the word for which has gardens set down directly in the "wilderness." Bacon's joined English as paradise- it would be hard to adju- Castle, in Surry County, the earliest known dicate between their beauty (for they had decorations colonial example in America, comprised an enclosed, within them) and their The parklands es- tripartite garden set down uncompromisingly in the tablished by late Elizabethan and Jacobean gentry and midst of what was then wild and hostile territory. Some aristocrats were clearly designed to be pleasing to the fifty years later in the the stunning terraces of and mind as well as to serve various social and Middleton Place in South Carolina (Figure 40) were political Indeed, we have to recall that dis- raised from the midst of swamps. As late as the 1920s, tinctions between beauty and utility, or between plea- the Italianate fantasy of Vizcaya in Florida was estab- sure and profit, are largely of recent origin and did lished directly within the tropical forest (Figure 41). not impede earlier discussions of place-making where A final set of examples of third nature establishing the terms may have overlapped or The ex- itself within the first is narrated by Kenneth Helphand, change works in both directions. A pleasure garden gardens created within such hostile environments as could be useful and productive, yielding herbs and sim- World War I trenches, internment camps, and West ples, for instance, as well as flowers, which themselves Bank served many practical functions such as perfuming in- The visual contrasts in all such examples, however, teriors. Equally, much delight and pleasure were taken are misleading to the extent that the idea of their place- in the more useful kitchen and physic gardens. making had almost certainly evolved out of agrarian The pleasure gardens' evolution out of sophisticated practice and experience elsewhere and was thence trans- agrarian and urban contexts testifies to their generally ferred into first nature. The Allen family at Bacon's accepted sequence in cultural history. Yet sometimes, Castle brought with them a European experience of whether or not they signal the history of cultural pro- gardens and a design format that was at least as old as cess, we encounter examples of third nature that have the fourteenth century.100 Gardens established within been established directly within the primal wilder- the primal wilderness will almost always be the prod-</p><p>66 CHAPTER 3 FIGURE 39- St. Catherine's Monastery, Mt. Sinai (photograph: I.</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 67 FIGURE 40. Aerial view of Middleton Place, South Carolina. Similarly, the entirely different gardens that Charles K. Savage created from 1928 at Thuya Lodge on Mount uct of a culture that has first developed them elsewhere Desert Island, Maine, found their inspiration else- from a second nature. The hermit saints, whose so- where-turn-of-the-century herbaceous borders, cot- journ in the desert is the theme of Byzantine and tage gardens, American Impressionist paintings-be- - Renaissance imagery (Figure 42), are each represented fore finding their rather astonishing niche along the as enjoying some flowering garden shade, presumably a flank of Mount Eliot (Figure 43). His intervention is reminiscence or approximation of gardens in monastic certainly announced by a series of terraces and rock communities (the reminiscence, of course, may be the staircases up which the visitor arrives and which had painter's). 101 Vizcaya derived its garden concepts from been established by an earlier owner of Thuya, Joseph a range of Italian and perhaps even Spanish-Moorish Henry Curtis, a Boston landscape architect; but, once sources before inserting them into the Florida forest. reached, however, the surprise and impact of this gar-</p><p>68 CHAPTER 3 FIGURE 4I. Aerial view of Vizcaya, Florida. played more eloquently than in the series of paintings of villas owned by the Medici in the Tuscan country- den oasis in the coastal woodland are striking. This side, executed by the late sixteenth-century Flemish effect is contrived equally by the garden's distinct con- artist Giusto Utens. These lunettes were commissioned trast with the surroundings and the equally studied to decorate the reception hall of one particular Medici fashion by which these very surroundings - the rock villa at Artimino; they constitute a miniature history of and - are allowed a presence within the en- the Medici control of their larger territory,103 displaying closure of the designed space, spilling (so to speak) the variety of cultural interventions made on different through the fence toward the regular and horticultural sites and over time in the countryside around Florence. elements of the From Utens's depictions we can register how garden The more usual process of evolution, then, would be elements have evolved out of and alongside the cul- for gardens not only to emerge out of traditions and tural landscape of fields and hunting territory, like the practices of second nature but also to lie contiguous walled orchard set apart from the groves of other fruit to such agrarian zones. Nowhere is this evolution dis- trees at Marignolle or Lappeggi (Figure 44) or the</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 69 FIGURE 42. Anonymous, Death of S. Ephraim the Syrian, icon, fifteenth century. Athens, Byzantine Museum. the juxtaposition of their enclosures to the larger spaces of farming or by recording how a cistern at Marignolle is decorated with a jet of water or a fish tank at La fenced area of square flower beds privileged within the Petraia is treated as a reflecting pool (Figure 45). orchard at La Magia. What is striking here is how cer- With the exception of the distant Pratolino, the tain elements of an essentially agrarian layout have been closer these Medici properties were located to the cul- treated in ways that give them added value-whether tural and urban center of Florence (Castello [see Figure that value is privacy, protection, or aesthetic shaping by 18], the Boboli Gardens, or La Petraia), the more elabo- way of spacing and grouping. Utens implies all this by rate became the elements and areas of third nature. All</p><p>CHAPTER 3 FIGURE Thuya Gardens, Mount Desert Island, Maine, have connections with agrarian management and ac- gotium is contrasted with the elegant aspect of otium tivity that are still sometimes imaged at the edges of the suggested by Sangallo's building. The whole complex lunettes. In the case of La Petraia, however, when no nicely calculates its status as humanist country retreat. agricultural terrain is shown, the descending terraces By contrast, at Il Trebbio, the most isolated of these of the enclosed garden increase in design complexity Medici properties, Utens depicts only a residual plea- as they move from rows of what look like espaliered sure ground. Its sloping and walled garden is separated fruit trees, through simple but geometrically figured from the larger farming and hunting territory; yet the parterres flanked by pavilions with open loggias, to the privacies and seclusion of its tiny garden plot seem to final level with a pair of double pergola circles enclos- have grown out of the utilities and necessities of the ing more fruit trees, now set in quincuncial form. cultural landscape. Even the pergola-covered walk, the Other villas adjudicate their place-making, especially enclosure's only decoration (which still, incidentally, the prominence given to garden artifice, according to survives [Figure 47]), is an elegant extrapolation of an the function of the property, which in turn depends essential agricultural feature. on its location. Poggio a Caiano literally marginalizes its pleasure garden within an enclosure at the right, VI dedicating the remaining territory to simple squares of orchard, groves, or shrubs (Figure 46); yet this un- As these considerations of what I have called the demonstrative acknowledgment of rural business or ne- three natures suggest, the garden's place within them</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 71 LA PEGGIO FIGURE 44- Giusto Utens, The Medici Villa of La Peggio (the modern Lappeggi), tempera on canvas, Museo Firenze As an example of this self-constructing relationship, Com'era. we might look finally at a famous and beautiful paint- ing by Giovanni Bellini of Saint Francis in Ecstacy (Fig- ure 48). Here the three natures are intermingled yet is complex. Its relationship as well as its complexities distinctly registered and work to define each will be evoked constantly throughout this book. What Bellini represents a "wilderness," an unmediated topog- is necessary here is only to insist that the third nature raphy, hinted at throughout as the appropriate retreat of gardens is best considered as existing in terms of the for such saintly activity, especially the rude rocks that other two: not only do we recognize and better under- dominate the foreground and Saint Francis's exposure stand any one nature by its relationship with the other to the sky; however, inasmuch as the saint is depicted two, but the third, with which this book is principally without his sandals, perhaps Bellini is alluding to an concerned, is always engaged in a dialogue with the instance of hierography ("Put off your shoes for other two. 104 the place is holy ground"). Then there is the culti-</p><p>72 CHAPTER 3 PRETAIA FIGURE 45. Giusto Utens, The Medici Villa of La Petraia, tempera on canvas, 1599. Museo Firenze Com'era. aura. But they are grounded on the artist's subtle grasp of different topographies and on his appreciation of different scales and effects of human intervention in vated landscape of farmstead, fields, and distant villa- the So the pergola and trelliswork, certainly to castle (maybe a town), a territory aptly inhabited by be registered as symbolizing the cross,108 also indicate a shepherd. Finally, there is the modest effort at cre- much about the saint's place-making and its relation to ating a third nature which Saint Francis has evidently the other natures. For many of his rudimentary garden initiated in his little garden, with its drainage or water- forms allude to elements in the other natures: the water collection channel, its raised flower bed, and a per- channel, to drainage ditches in the second nature and to gola with regular horizontal side pieces, a seat, and the streams in the first; a pergola and a bench, to the shade arched enclosure it forms with the cave. and place for rest that are everywhere found on the Bellini's painting is necessarily focused on symbolic edges of woodland. A pergola, as at Il Trebbio, is per- or typological readings of its scenery, inhabitants, and haps one of the primary forms of garden-making in hot these constitute its powerful and magical climates where shelter for humans, the exposure of fruit</p><p>The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures 73 POGGIO FIGURE 46. Giusto Utens, The Medici Villa of Poggio a Caiano, tempera on canvas, 1599. Museo Firenze Com'era. to the sun for ripening, and the decorative potential of its arch or tunnel are eloquent of the cultural transi- tion from second to third natures. What Saint Francis, however, has not been allowed by Bellini is some form of enclosure for his residual garden, a gesture perhaps to the saint's surrender of himself to the wilderness.</p><p>74 CHAPTER 3 FIGURE Pergola overlooking the small walled garden at Il Trebbio, Tuscany, photographed in</p><p>75 The Idea of a Garden and the Three Natures Giovanni Bellini, St. Francis in Ecstacy, New York. tempera and FIGURE oil on panel, 48. 1480. The Frick Collection,</p>