Villa+d'Este

The Villa d'Este was carved from the side of a mountain in fulfillment of the twin minds of Ippolito II d'Este and Pirro Ligorioi, two of the most erudite gardeners in history. Overlooking the Roman Compagna in the 1550s it was the most sophisticated of all Roman gardens. Its genius lay in the orchestration of many themes created by the human imagination, but over the years and in the absence of any contemporary documentation, there is no original score. Nevertheless, art has flowed from these gardens just because they remain an enigma.

I have never visited the gardens but my standpoint is that photographs of others are often a powerful substitute that condense the experience of gardening to what Sir George Sitwell, an avid gardener in the Renaissance tradition, defined as creating a series of theatrical views with a foreground merging into a vague countryside background. Sir George was involved in a landscape project to transform his ample ancestral estate at Renishaw. The reality for most people is that they garden within a small plot with the aim of creating framed views within a much smaller viewfinder. My point is that with the ready availabilty of such snapshots, captured avidly by professional photographers, an actual visit to a famous garden is likely to be a letdown in relation to the virtual large-scale vision which prompted the visit. It is important to stress this photographic principle because, once the grand design, visible only from an helicoper, has been laid out by the creators, filling in the detail and the garden's future development, is a matter of relatively tiny manipulations and small-scale critical appraisals. Writers on gardens often reiterate what pictures have shown. Both pictures and words are essential to make a garden come fully into existence and offer explanations about its meaning.

In this connection, Lafcadio Hearn, a noted writer on Japan, said this about Japanese rock gardens: "//In order to comprehend the beauty of a Japanese garden, it is necessary to understand -- or at least to learn to understand -- the beauty of stones. Not of stones quarried by the hand of man, but of stones shaped by nature only. Until you can feel, and keenly feel, that stones have character, that stones have tones and values, the whole artistic meaning of a Japanese garden cannot be revealed to you. Not only is every stone chosen with a view to its particular expressiveness of form, but every stone in the garden or about the premises has its separate and individual name, indicating its purpose or its decorative duty//."

The 16th century, guests of Cardinal Ippolito arrived at the Villa dEste through an entrance gate in the wall of the lowest level. They then progressed onwards and upwards, necessarily slowly and with much contemplation about the literary meaning of the various levels.

Their first visual encounter would be through a wooden pergola covered in fragrant jasmine, ivies and grape vines, inspired, through the research of the Pirro Ligorio on Roman gardens.

Visitors glimpsed the Cardinal's palace through lattice work. This was their social destination far away up on the mountain side. Immediatly above them was a cupola covered with roses, jasmine and ivy.

The surrounding quadrangles were filled with small pomegranates and other fruit trees within low hedges of rosemary,lavender, myrtle and box. Further on was the Cardinal's flower garden with medicinal plants for the practical medical use of his household.

The Oval Fountain was the first to be built in the garden and one of two made by Ligorio himself. We can get some idea of the grip that ancient myths had on the minds of educated people of the time from the way plants and the garden statuary were presented as an integrated story.

The hillside around the fountain is planted with laurel trees in homage to Apollo. The statue thqt tops the fountain is the prophetess of Rome (Sybyl), beloved of Apollo, who has been transformed into Memory. She sits on a throne with her son representing Tivoli as the new source of all knowledge. The statue is a copy of an ancient one presented to the people of Rome by Pope Pius V after he had removed all of the statues that Ligorio had gathered together by his excavations and research on behalf of the Pope's predecessor, Pius IV.

Apollo had granted the sybil eternal life, but not eternal youth, and in order to escape from the tyrany of ageing she leapt into the sea asking Neptune to intercede with the gods to keep her young. The basin of the fountain represents Neptune's domain, the sea, and in the centre sits Venus rising from her shell. Venus also spoke with the Gods on the sybyl's behalf.

The sibyl's journey from Tivoli to Rome continues through the gardens down the mountain side via the Avenue of the Hundred Fountains to the Fountain of Rome.

Most of the symbolism of the Tivoli gardens is concerned with water which binds people and gods in a powerful relationship.

The actual waterworks are fed from the River Aniene via a canal built in 1560s from a resored Roman aqueduct and by rainwater collected in a cistern immediately above the Oval Fountain. From here gravity feeds the varous fountains at lower levels.

Tivoli stands in history as the culmination of water as an inspiration to turn places into gardens. From this point we may look back in an historical perspective through medieval times to the oasis gardens of the Middle East and Egypt, and forwards to the present, gathering the memories of natural processes and human endeavour from past place-making to link new places with current ideas about the environment.

Gardening is only one sort of place-making. Just as writing ranges from shopping lists to sonnets, so place-making with plants comprises everything from back yards to golf courses, from urban parks with handicap access and full sporting amenities to academic and corporate campuses, from habitats protected habitats for rare species to the invention of memorial landscapes, from the recovery of blighted industrial zones to the creation of town landscapes, botanical trails, and inner-city gardens. And just as some skills useful for sonnet writing will scarcely be called upon for the creation of shopping lists, so in place-making the repertoire of concepts, skills, and invention will vary considerably according to the type of place to be created.

Two common elements in all place-making with plants are ecological truth and imaginative truth. The more we can learn about how people respond to places in terms of the facts presented there and ideas spawned in the mind of the visitor the better we can plan them with due regard to both truths. This brings up planning as the fundamental element in place-making with plants. According the the objective of a plan there is a sliding scale of cultural intervention in the natural world. This scale has been codified in the concept of 'three kinds of nature'. //First nature// is nature at the first point of human contact. In ecological terms it is wilderness. In cultural terms it is the primeval territory of the gods. We now exist in the world of //second nature// where living in environments planned for survival and habitation and where the evidence of labour and productivity dominates our surroundings. //Third nature// is a phrase coined by the Renaissance writers Bonfadio and Taegio in reference to Italian villa gardens. Human interventions in nature go beyhond what is required by the necessities of agriculture and settlement. The planning objective is to to give a place meaning through some kind of intellectual endeavor. Examples of managing third nature display a concentration of effort directed to environmental notions of science, history and beauty expressed in gardens, agrarian scenery and wildlife habitats.

The latter two categories of places with plants are distinguished by their beauty of organisation expressed in the land use of pre-industrial rural cultures and their biodiversity. In a world rapidly losing its green heritage assets protected landscapes and nature sites have now come to full sophisticated enclosures that we are used to calling 'pleasure gardens'.

//Hay Meadow at Muker, Swaledale, Yorkshire Dales National Park//