Gardens in seventeenth-century British embroidery

Magazine Antiques, June, 1999 by Kathleen Epstein

The elegant embroidered composition illustrated in Plate I, probably made in celebration of a betrothal, displays the skill of a professional designer and the competence of a practiced embroiderer's hand. The setting for the lovers' rendezvous is the back of a balconied country house, whose guests look out on and walk through a pleasure garden with beds planted in knot designs, an orchard, vine-covered alley ways, and a heath beyond. These pleasure gardens were considered extensions of the public areas of the house. The activities of villagers - a shepherd with his flock, a stag hunt with dogs, and carts going to a neighboring town - are portrayed in the background. A unique aspect of this picture is that it is an accurate record of what an English country house garden looked like in the first half of the seventeenth century. It is an important document since so few gardens from this period have survived the whims of fashion, economy, successive owners, and generations of gardeners' hands.

Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) expressed the sentiments of many of his contemporaries in his essay Of Gardens, printed in its present form in 1625. He began: "God almighty first planted a Garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment of the spirits of man."(1) A favorite with embroiderers of all ages, gardens figure as verdant backdrops for realistic scenes, such as the intimate party illustrated in Plate II. More frequently they provide lush colorful scenery for the Old Testament and allegorical stories that were so frequently the subject of needlework at the time. What appear to the modern eye to be peculiar or purely imaginary elements in embroidered gardens [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATES III, IV OMITTED] had counterparts in actual English gardens of the period, as the following examples illustrate.

The title page of a popular early seventeenth-century embroidery pattern book features an engraving of a small pleasure garden - similar to the knot gardens in Plate I - surrounded by a trelliswork fence [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. The beds hold only a few plants. Beginning in the sixteenth century, new plants and trees were imported into Europe and England from the East and the New World. The sixteenth-century historian William Harrison (1534-1593) thought this worthy of note in his Description of England:

It is a world...to see how many strange herbs, plants, and annual fruits are daily brought unto us from the Indies, Americas, Taprobane [Sri Lanka], Canary Isles, and all parts of the world.(2)

These florae were usually grown as curiosities. Prevailing fashion dictated that the exotic flowers and plants be set off singly, not massed together as in modern gardens. So in embroideries, as well as other decorative arts of the period which illustrate gardens, flowering plants are displayed singly in a bed, in a pot, or on a small molehill-sized mound, similar to the mounds visible in Plate I. Flowerpots without plants in them were also prized for their decorative qualities:

Other ancient Ornaments of a Garden are Flower-pots, which painted white and placed on Pedestals, either on the ground in a straight line on the edges of your Walks, or on your Walls, or at the corners of your Squares, are exciting pleasant.(3)

An element common to pictorial embroideries is a fanciful tree on which grows a variety of fruits or a tree whose fruits are a variety of colors [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE 1B OMITTED]. Harrison's Description offers an explanation for this seemingly whimsical motif.

We have in lie sort such workmen as are not only excellent in grafting the natural fruits but also in their artificial mixtures, whereby one tree bringeth forth sundry fruits [or] on the same, fruit of diverse colors and tastes, dallying as it were with Nature and her course.(4)

An embroidered image related to the "tree of many fruits" is the "vine of many flowers," which often arches over an allegorical character, as in the needlework in Plate III. This curved floral doorway is actually the front view of a garden bower. Thomas Hill (b.c. 1528) provided a clear example of a bower in an engraving included in his Proffitable Arte of Gardening [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Bowers were constructed of juniper or willow poles, bound together and arched over. The gardener then transplanted various types of flowering vines, including those of fruits and vegetables, and wound the stems and tendrils around the poles,

that the branches of the Vine, Melone, or Cucumber; running and spreading all ouer, might se shadow [shade a person] and keepe both the heat & sun from the walkers and sitters there vnder.(5)

Authors of contemporary gardening books wrote in some detail about the best time to plant. They agreed that the greatest influence on sowing, planting, and grafting was the "fauour or hindreance of the heauens." Gardeners were urged to observe the celestial bodies:

and the more of these you can find at your time of concurring, the better it is:...in due time of the Moones ages, in due time of her place, in the Zodiacke, in due aspecte of Satume, well placed in the sight of Heaven etc.(6)