RESEARH ON THE PARADISE GARDENS AND ROMAN GARDEN, TRADITIONS IN MODERN ART

Abstract

The two “schools†of gardening, into one of which almost every garden since the memory of man runlets not to the contrary, until the nineteenth century, could be placed, can be traced back to the two distinct originals of our western Christian civilization. Until fairly recently most people in the western world were brought up if not on, at least more or less in touch with, the Bible; consequently, for most western men, Eden was the garden. Granted that no such place ever existed outside Jewish mythology, yet since a myth stands for something in the mind and soul of man, the nature of Eden is significant. And Eden was, clearly, an “English†garden. This paradise was a natural garden of all manner of beautiful plants, a garden whose charm can only have depended on those plants, on the lie of the land, and the disposition of pleasant waters.