In a previous two part article entitled "a Passion For Bedding Plants" - parts One and Two, I wrote about the passion for bedding plants which swept through the British Isles from 1840 to 1870. While the British gardeners were at the center of the garden world throughout the nineteenth century, this passion for bedding plants also swept through the rest of Europe. The British craze for bedding plants was connected with the development of railroads and with a mild climate which allowed greenhouses to be heated rather cheaply. Gardens in the United States were influenced by British trends, but bedding schemes didn't really catch on until after the American Civil War (1860 - 1865). By the mid 1860s, British gardeners were starting to become nostalgic for the hardy perennials which had been banned from fashionable British gardens for decades. Gardeners in the United States added bedding schemes to their traditional gardens of hardy perennials, but they were influenced by the way that the British reintroduced hardy perennials back into their gardens.
The photo at the top of this article was scanned from my copy of "Henderson's Picturesque Gardens". This book was published in New York City in 1901, but many of the photos were taken in European gardens. This photo of a walled English garden is entitled "An Old Fashioned Garden", and while the style wasn't really old fashioned at the time, that is how the owners of such flower gardens always saw them.
The photo shows a double border of herbaceous plants separated by a straight path. It isn't certain when the first such borders were created, but the double borders at Arley Hall in Cheshire are known to have existed in the 1840s. The double borders of Newstead Abbey, may be even older; during the 19th century, they were believed to date back to before 1539.
There are Medieval paintings which show narrow flowerbeds along the base of walls and I am sure that many early gardens featured narrow flower beds on both sides of a walk, what makes the borders in the photo at the top of this article typical of the nineteenth century is their depth. The woodcut below was published in 1558 and it shows a typical Northern Renaissance garden which was divided into four equal parts, or "quarters". The entire fenced garden in the woodcut would be called a compartment. A Renaissance garden might be composed of a number of compartments - or gardens within gardens.
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