A Passion For Bedding Plants - Part One

"The Oxford Companion to Gardens" says that a flower bed is "strictly speaking, any area of the garden well demarcated from its surroundings and devoted to the cultivation of a particular group of plants; outside the kitchen garden, it is most commonly given over to a pattern of ornamental flowers. A bed is distinguished from a border primarily in that a border has a wall or hedge as a backdrop, although in some cases freely sited beds are called borders if they are significantly longer than they are wide". I am willing to go along with their definition, even though it is really only correct for gardens created during the past two hundred years.

For thousands of years, the gardens of Western Civilization (including Islamic gardens) were usually formal or geometric. The formal tradition began in ancient Egypt and continued in an unbroken line until the 18th century when wealthy British landowners began to replace their formal gardens with informal landscape gardens. By 1800 a passion for landscape gardens in the English style was sweeping through Europe, and formal gardens were out of fashion. By the 1830's formal gardens were back in fashion, but while the lines of these formal gardens were traditional, the plants in the flower beds were very characteristic of the Victorian era.

The engraving below, entitled "Spring", shows a Dutch garden of around 1560. It shows the basic idea behind the formal tradition. Beds, which could be planted either with vegetables or flowers, are separated by narrow paths; the beds and paths are laid out to form a geometric pattern. Gardens like this are called parterres; the word is French and has been used by Europeans since the sixteenth century to describe gardens laid out on flat ground, in which the geometric pattern is usually at least as important as the plants.