Gardens

Woman harvesting spinach

Vegetables – roots, onions and cabbages, helped to bulk up the stock pot, though not as effectively as modern varieties would have done, while culinary herbs helped improve flavour and were readily available, unlike the exotic spices from the East which became more common from the time of the Crusades. Orchards provided nuts and fruit, even occasionally grapes.

Utilitarian gardens were not only vital for production of fruit and vegetables for the table. They were also essential for the production of medicines. Although the power of herbs to cure was vastly exaggerated, their antiseptic, soporific, stimulating and healing properties provided the only medicines available apart from those dictated by superstition. Monasteries especially developed medicinal gardens for the production of remedies, and herbs were also essential for other household business – floors were strewn with herbs for their insect repellent qualities, while many herbs produced dyes used for homespun cloth.

According to Culpeper's Herbal (1653), most herbs and weeds had medicinal uses:
Bryony, careful administered, was invaluable for diseases of the head, palsies, convulsions, miscarriages, kidney stones, phlegm, running sores and gangrene.
Bistort was a sovereign remedy for poisons, plague, measles, small pox, ruptures, bruises, jaundice and gum disease.

Presumably some patients survived.

Although peasant gardens may have been planted to be as productive as possible, for the sole purpose of keeping their owners alive, even the most utilitarian patch would, if only by coincidence, have produced flowers, scents, shade and calming greenery.  For the better off who did not have to spend every waking hour struggling to survive, gardens were created as solely decorative and relaxing retreats, balm for the soul, imbued with spiritual significance.  Such paradise gardens were known from ancient times (think of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon) and were found in every Roman villa

courtyard garden depicted in a fresco at Pompeii

Mediaeval people saw gardens as an opportunity to represent Eden, but their intention was to create divine order in the midst of chaos. In a world where survival was precarious, there was nothing romantic and desirable about untamed wilderness.  The wild forest, lawless, full of danger and inhabited by monsters had no place in the image of Paradise.  A perfect garden was an enclosed space, neat and disciplined, offering artificial precision and safety.  If castle and monastery walls were not available to keep the wilderness out, wattle fences would do. Flowers were admired for their beauty and scent but were grown in rigidly defined beds, trained along trellises and up walls.  Trees were shaped and pollarded.  Turf was levelled or raised as banks and seating.

An enclosed garden with trellises, climbing roses and turf seats

Madonna by a Fountain by Van Eyck

Water was an important feature in any garden, paradise or utilitarian, not only for its symbolism but as an essential ingredient for growth. A plentiful supply was needed even in wet Britain. Fountains and pools offered decorative options, and lead cisterns were more practical means for storing the water supply that would keep the garden green and productive.

decorative lead cistern at St. Fagan's Castle

The ornate controlled structure of the medieval garden survived through the Renaissance and the 17th Century, with the development of mazes and knot gardens, where the complicated layout of beds, outlined by low hedges of box, yew, rosemary or other shrubs, was more important than any flowers planted within. Such designs demonstrated Man’s control of unruly nature.

Knot garden at Hatfield House

In Tudor times the garden remained enclosed, a roofless extension of the house, with walls or hedges keeping the wilderness out. But by the 17th Century, horizons had expanded.  Parterres and topiary still demonstrated Man’s control, but where finance allowed, gardens spread.  They were no longer private places of retreat, but areas for public display

Garden created by William III at Hampton Court

In the 18th Century, with Britain spreading its control round the globe and with technology on the brink of making impossible things happen, confidence in Man’s absolute control of the universe was so great that nature was no longer seen as a threat, and entire Medieval and Tudor gardens were swept away to make room for Georgian parklands: nature designed by Man.

Parkland created around Milton Abbey
by Capability Brown