- The kitchen garden
Herbarium - originally a small garden containing flowers and
herbs; later usually a physic garden of medicinal herbs. By
1300s, the term referred most often to an ornamental garden planted with an eye to being
viewed from above, from the second story of a home or from a
viewing mount. By the
1400s, these had evolved into the knot garden.
- a square or oblong garden, often enclosed by walls, hedges, or
wattled or trellised fences. It was intersected by paths, often
had a pool or fountain in the center, and a border of flowers.
Cultivated flowers included the rose, lily, iris,
and peony. Trellises or wattle fences were covered with
honeysuckle (woodbine), roses, or grape vines.
ortus - A generic word for gardens of all kinds
Ortolanus, gardinarius - A gardener
- Vine arbors arching over and shading paths.
- Larger, landscaped park or garden
Pomerium - Utilitarian orchard (the word orchard is derived from wort
gerd, "plant yard")
Virectum, virgultum, viridarium - A pleasure garden or,
frequently, an orchard planted for the beauty of blossom and the
comfort of shade, rather than for its produce of fruit or nuts
Castle and manor gardens
On the larger farms and estates of the early
Middle Ages, timber-built halls housed
higher status, while servants and slaves lived in smaller
outbuildings. These estates were often surrounded by earthen
walls topped with palisade fences, beyond which lay the ditch
from which the earth had been taken to make the wall. Where
defense was less necessary, several small farmsteads might
cluster together, each with a central house of wood and thatch
and outlying smaller buildings. Around all was the encircling
fence of wood or stone, often ringed by an earthen embankment
and a ditch.
By the 1100s, manor houses began to be made of stone,
and stone-built castles also
appeared. These castles and manor
houses also had gardens. In 1123, Henry I enclosed a large park
at Woodstock to make a garden; in the same century there were:
A royal garden at Kingsholm near Gloucester
nine-acre garden at Kingsbury near Dunstable
A garden at Havering-atte-Bower in Essex that boasted a resident
gardener with -- even at that early date -- a hereditary
Pleasure gardens at the
palaces at Winchester, Nottingham, Arundel, and Windsor
An early manuscript describes the
plants grown in the
garden of "Henry the
and while scholars disagree about exactly who Henry is, it may
be that the person referred to is Henry, Archdeacon of
Huntingdon. Whoever he may have been, Henry’s garden was typical
for the 1100s. It is planted on four sides with nearly
a hundred different herbs. The
plantings on the north side are
described first; following this come three more lists of plants,
probably for the east, south, and west sides of the garden, for
the list would most likely have proceeded
"sunwise" or clockwise, for luck.
Like other gardens of this time, Henry the
Englishman's garden may well have been encircled
by a shallow ditch and earthen dike, topped with a wall, fence,
or hedge. Gardens like these are often depicted in medieval art;
they were, in the words of Reginald of Durham "...laid out on a quadrangular plan, and fenced on all
Henry's garden may have had a green lawn
at its center, and perhaps a pool or fountain. A central path may
have divided the garden in two, or an intersecting path might
have produced four quarters -- a survival of the ancient
chahar bagh of Persia.
Emilia in the Rose Garden
If it was such a hortus conclusis, "enclosed garden,"
it would offer privacy and
protection from two-legged as well as four-legged marauders. In
many ways, these gardens continued the tradition of the
courtyard gardens of the Romano-British villas, with their
straight paths, geometrical beds, and uses of water.
An Englishman named Alexander Neckam (or Nequam or Neckham), born
in 1157, provides us with detailed information about the plants
of the 12th century garden in his De Naturis Rerum
(On the Nature of Things). He says an
...should be adorned with roses and lilies, heliotrope, violets, and
mandrake; thus also with parsley, and costmary, and fennel, and
southernwood, and coriander, sage and savory, hyssop, garden
mint, rue, ditanny, smallage, pellitory, lettuce, garden cress,
and peonies. And let there be a raised bed given over to onions,
garlic, squash, elecampane. Cucumbers with curving bellies
should also be in the ideal garden, and numbing poppies, and
likewise daffodils and bank ursine.
And do not neglect potherbs, if you would have abundance; nor
beets, Good King Henry, spinach, and sorrel and mallows. Some
gardens profitably bring together anise and mustard, and white
pepper, and wormwood. This noble garden should present you with
medlars, quince, and wardon pears; peaches, palm-sized, from
Persia; pears of St. Regulus...
familiar plants of his homeland -- violets and smallage, Good King
Henry and cabbage, calendula, hound's tongue, and mugwort. He makes it clear that these
plants, many of which could be harvested from roadsides and
rough meadows, were also cultivated in gardens, along with such
exotics as myrtle and coriander and the "pears of St. Regulus."