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A Basilica Garden

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In his introduction to New Classicism: Omnibus Volume, copyright 1990, Leon Krier writes about how rare innovation is in nature; he states that "In nature as it is relevant to man, the principle of life means growth until maturity, reproduction according to type and species stability. Classicism assumes the same to be true for artistic creation. Innovation in Form will occur only with the introduction of a new functional type." This is why so much classical art and architecture seems frozen in time; any unnecessary innovation is likely to be dismissed as an aberration.

Krier was mainly writing about the classical tradition in the architecture of Western Civilization. It has proved difficult to revive that tradition because during most of the last century the classical tradition was rejected in favor of modernism. Of all the arts, garden design was least affected by the modernist movement; formal gardens continued to be created in an unbroken tradition dating back to ancient Egypt. It is much easier to continue an unbroken tradition than it is to revive one, but the difficulty of working within the tradition of formal gardens is that while modern houses function differently than those of the eighteenth century, the way that we live in our gardens has remained basically unchanged for thousands of years. Like the ancient Egyptians, we mainly grow plants, stroll, and dine in our gardens. After thousands of years of evolution, it can seem like all of the creative possibilities within the tradition of formal gardens have been thoroughly explored, but I am not convinced that they have.

In my own garden, I am using the formal tradition in an attempt to unify a collection of plants from around the world. This was the primary function of formal structure during the last century. The gardens at Sissinghurst Castle are an excellent example of formal structure being used for this purpose.

While formal structure has been used very creatively to unify collections of plants, there has been less creativity in the more purely architectural tradition of the Italian formal garden. Many imitations of Italian Renaissance gardens were created during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially in England and the United States. These imitations reflected the forms of Renaissance gardens without going to the roots, so they seem sterile and soulless.

In his book "De Architectura", the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius, who lived during the first century B.C.E., wrote that temples should have proportions "worked out after the fashion of the members of a finely-shaped human body." saying that "if Nature designed the human body so that its members are proportioned to the figure as a whole, the ancients had good reason to lay down the rule that in perfect buildings the different parts must bear an exact symmetrical relation to the whole". This passage was the part of the book that the Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti (1406 - 1472) found especially interesting, and through his book "De re aedificatoria" (Ten Books on Architecture), this concept became central to Renaissance architecture.