Renaissance garden designers embraced the basic concepts of the Renaissance. They used the mathematical principles of proportion and harmony to create highly organized, geometric designs in a formal style.
Their original idea was to create gardens based on Roman designs with knowledge they derived from classical literary texts. In particular, they were impressed by garden descriptions from the writings of Pliny and others, which described romantic gardens featuring bowers, fountains, groves, and wooded areas. They sought to transform this literature into a physical reality.
Early Italian Renaissance Gardens The early Italian Renaissance gardens were based on a simple layout that reflected the villa it surrounded. This rule applied whether one was dealing with a grand castle or a modest villa. These designers never intended for the garden to stand alone. Rather, it was viewed as an extension of the architecture of the house
Initially in Italy where all this started, Renaissance gardens weren't grand by any means. Garden historians say most were rather modest, places nobles could use for private purposes. To escape the rat race of city life, these Italian garden owners retreated to their rural farmhouses and villas where the gardens became places of joy, pleasure, and fulfillment where they listened to music, read the classics, and meditated.
Among the various features of these early gardens were hedges, groves of plane trees, clipped boxwood hedges, roses, laurel, pergolas, fountains, springs, or other water sources.
Fruits played a prominent role in these early gardens. The texts on which they were based called for apples, Damson plums, pears, pomegranates, and vine fruits as well as beautiful bay and plane trees along with clipped boxwood.
Renaissance Garden Principles
Renaissance gardens were based upon a number of principles from the Renaissance view towards art in general. The gardens embodied an interaction between nature and art. In this respect, nature didn't get the upper hand. Rather, the garden represented humanity's power over nature to control and tame it. As a result, these gardens were a combination of natural areas and highly formalized ones.
The garden was "a whole made up of discrete and enclosed units with linking elements." In some respects, the Renaissance gardens retained certain aspects of medieval gardens with the enclosed units being an example.
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