Renee M. DeLuca

When you go into a garden, you cross from the ordinary world into an extraordinary landscape. Gardeners give careful thought to every aspect of their plots: plants, water, rock and soil are purposefully and artfully arranged to please the senses. The Garden of Eden, of course, is the quintessential garden and the prototype for all gardens that followed. In the creation story at the foundation of three western religions, humanity itself was born in a garden -- and for a time, people lived there in a state of innocence and perfect bliss.

Italian Gardens

In Italy, gardens around the Mediterranean were cool retreats, built around grottos, caves and mountain hollows. Italian gardens actually became the model for formal English gardens during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were grandiose and the English added esoteric and symbolic touches in the form of mazes and labyrinths made of box hedges, pyramids, little temples and statuary with suns, moons, and pillars. Meanwhile, in France, formal gardens grew even more elaborate than their English counterparts.

For centuries, the Tuscan landscape has exerted a powerful hold on the imaginations of Italian city dwellers and foreign visitors with its human scale, and the merging of vineyards and olive groves into gardens and then into villas themselves. “Mary gardens” were powerful plots of land that some Roman Catholics devoted to the Virgin Mary. There, her story is told through the symbolic language of sacred flowers -- especially lilies and roses.

French Gardens

When one speaks of the French style in garden design, one is normally talking about the formal gardens that were so popular in European society in previous centuries. Formally arranged gardens began in sixteenth-century Italy, but it was French gardeners who developed the style and popularized it across the continent.

Most people agree that the crowning glory of the formally arranged garden is to be found at the Palace of Versailles in France. It is a series of gardens, planned by Andre Le Notre, and is one of the most ambitious landscaped gardens ever commissioned. It incorporates greenery, sculpture, several water fountains, gravel, stone and parterres. The jewel in this crown is the central Grand Canal.

English Gardens

An English Cottage Garden is a thing of beauty, yet quite a practical garden at the same time. It is a garden that is packed with plants. Every space is used. The garden seems to overflow with flowers. A true English Cottage Garden contains herbs, vegetables, fruit and flowers. Often perennials, shrubs and annuals are used as edging for the fruit and vegetables.

English homes usually had only a small amount of land available for gardening and other supplies of food were miles away. Without cars and extra income, families would work to grow everything they needed right beside the house. The result was a cheerful profusion of colorful flowers that were grown together just outside the kitchen door.