William Turner and the Renaissance Herb Garden

A customer, clearly blessed with a magnanimity denied to the rest of the human race admitted to me the other day that she not only read my blogs, but actually enjoyed them.  Having been somewhat tied up recently writing a piece on Venetian contract killers and distracted by schadenfreude (I am not allowed to eat meringues any more, but this was almost as good) watching the bankers getting their inevitable roasting even before being divinely consigned to the fiery pit. I haven’t done much lately so here is the original version of  something I wrote on Turner in response to a more-than-usually inane bit on the BBC and let’s face it, no one does inane better than a BBC gardening correspondent pressed into the quick-sand of garden history. It is of course quite trendy, what with Starkey’s publication of his book on Henry VIII, the Herb Society about to do a “Tudor issue” of their magazine and that dire travesty on the dynasty just finished on the telly, so here’s my take on the subject. 

REBIRTH

Anthony Lyman-Dixon

If any Tudor figure may be said to represent  English botany at its best, it has  to be William Turner, the epitome of the Renaissance man  whose enquiring mind  also embraced theology (his day job), medicine, ornithology, ichthyology and public hygiene. It seems ironic then that in describing the WilliamTurnerGarden. during the television broadcast from Chelsea, “Medieval” was mentioned three times when  it was Turner’s life-long battle against Medieval thinking that nearly cost him his life. To add insult to injury, far from this being a passing oversight, the designer emphasised that a deliberate attempt had been made to cobble Medieval and Tudor elements into a  pastiche which Turner himself  would have found hard to recognise. This included paradoxes such as a “medieval knot garden”  comprised of box  of which Turner wrote “The wood of boxe…serveth no use in medicine….the flowers…make bitter honey”   and Santolina whose attributes and identification were sufficiently dubious for him  to caution “This therefore I have given you warning of, to read all new writers with judgement, and to try their saying before ye put them in to practice”[i] . Turner was never one to suffer fools gladly and I suspect that having been  reduced to the ranks of the fossilized plagiarists of the Middle Ages, if he were alive today, he would have demanded a retraction from the BBC

Although ignored in the instance cited above, for garden designers, the transition from Medieval to Renaissance is of no less significance than any other aspect of the arts  and given the media’s inability to put any event between “Gladiator” and the Gunpowder plot in its time and place,  it seems apposite to look at herbs in this context.

When, in 1338 Petrarch looked forward to the time   when "our grandsons will be able to walk back into the pure radiance of the past", he thought that this burst of  sun-light was just around the corner unaware that the Black Death was about to set everything back at least a century.  Nor could he have envisaged that when that time  eventually did arrive early in the sixteenth century, its impact would be  magnified a thousand-fold by the invention of the printing press. This allowed Turner, Mattioli, Ruel and Lusitanus to produce their own widely-read commentaries on Dioscorides in their respective countries.

 Unfortunately  as soon as commentators escaped from the stultifying influence of the Church and learnt to think for themselves, it soon became apparent that Dioscorides was not all that he was cracked up to be. It may be going a bit too far to describe “De Materia Medica”  as a “nauseating mixture of obscenity and superstition”[ii] as John Raven, a modern writer has done, but Dioscorides’ text is vague, the drawings, copied and recopied from one another over many centuries, are virtually useless and, because the herbs described  are all indigenous to a Mediterranean environment, most  are irrelevant to practitioners north of the Alps. Arguably, it was the celebrated German triumvirate of Brunfels, Boch and Fuchs who first started looking at plants themselves rather than the distorted illustrations in books or perhaps they simply managed to grab the most talented of the contemporary illustrators, notably Weiditz, to draw their plants before anybody else could. Arber[iii] points out that Brunfels the earliest of the group still tried to shoe-horn his native German plants in to Dioscorides text in spite of the sophistication of his engravings.

Although Turner himself  remained largely  faithful to Dioscorides, he too looked at plants and  is credited with the first descriptions of  three hundred native species, which elevates him far beyond any Medieval figure. After narrowly escaping being burnt for his religious opinions he became Dean of Wells and it can be  no coincidence that this same Renaissance spirit of enquiry with which he and others questioned  sterile religious dogma, when applied to the new science of botany,  raised it  to fresh heights.  Indeed, Brunfels had escaped a Carthusian monastery, Boch risked all by becoming a Lutheran and Garcia Da Orta fled the inquisition to Goa where he pioneered the study of Indian plants and made a fortune in the process.Undoubtedly, were it not for the prevailing climate of religious intolerance, Turner would not have travelled so far on his botanising expeditions which, in turn fuelled his feud with, Mattioli, a fellow pupil of Ghini. Actually neither man comes over as particularly charming, Turner lambasts Mattioli at every opportunity and Mattioli[iv] peppers his margins with “Mala intelligenza di x” and “errore di y”, with both men pitching into the unfortunate Fuchs with immoderate savagery.

It was partly due to the inability of  Europe’s greatest botanists to agree and the failure of  even the most imaginative writers to coerce the New World discoveries into conformity with a Dioscoridean template, that led to the invention of herbaria, the “Hortus siccus”  for the study of dried plant material and to the foundation of Padua’s Botanic Garden in 1545 for the examination of living specimens. People were dying through apothecaries misidentifications and damaging Venice’s reputation for rigorous quality control in consequence. Venice, the leading European trading centre for herbs, was notoriously less bothered about the loss of life than being hit in the pocket and it reacted strongly by funding the foundation of the Padua garden[v].  Ignorant apothecaries were also killing off the citizens of London, a point which Turner makes across two long-winded pages in his justification for writing his “New Herball” in English rather than Latin. In fact his text and the founding document for the Padua garden are written in such similar terms that one wonders who influenced whom.

Increasing Renaissance affluence allowed for a corresponding sense of security amongst the populace. Nature and the countryside, which were seen to be hostile forces during the Middle Ages, were, if not conquered, now perceived as offering at least a modus vivendi. Walls, which were a medieval obsession, came tumbling down in accordance with Alberti’s fashionable view that a villa should have a vista.  Monks, instead of being castigated for enjoying their gardens were encouraged to maintain them.  Foundations whose lands had daringly begun to spread into the Devil’s realm beyond the walls prior to the Black Death, began their progress once more and although the old suspicions remained, the new attitudes allowed a compromise to be reached. Louis of Blois who became the Benedictine abbot of Liessies in 1530 persuaded his  brethren to stay within walls by tending their own pleasure gardens saying that he  “hoped in this way to use the beauties of nature as avenues by which souls could be led to God”[vi].

Not everyone saw it this way however; deploring these changes as symptomatic of a moral degeneracy, the modern academic, Marilyn Stokstad  wrote “As the Middle Ages came to an end and a prosperous hard-headed merchant class of city dwellers became patrons of the arts, the literary garden of love became the garden of earthly delights, a mocking and dangerously erotic garden. In the Garden of Earthly Delights every element was reversed so that the garden of Mary became the garden of the Tempter, and the garden itself an erotic symbol”[vii].

On the domestic front, Medieval gardens rather than possessing herb gardens, were herb gardens. Except for the very rich, few could afford the sort  of princely pleasure gardens described by Crescenzi[viii] though the mercantile classes aspired to those depicted in Chaucer’s “Merchants Tale” whose function seems as much to provide privacy as yield fruit. For the rest, plants such as aconite to kill vermin, Belladonna as a pain killer, cannabis ostensibly for textiles, dye plants and cleaning plants like Soapwort and equisetum were all crowded into cramped rectangular beds amongst exedra, sadly dribbling fonts and trellising whose unfulfilled purpose was to convince their owners of their  mastery over nature. For the most part though, culinary and medicinal herbs beyond the basics didn’t assume great importance. Snobbery dictated that the flavours yielded by exotic spices were better than those from herbs and it was generally accepted by church and laity alike  that herbs gathered from the  wild were more potent than those grown in gardens. So, increasingly, if one needed herbs one could either go to the vegetable market or to the apothecary, rather as the modern housewife  keeps a few cans of baked beans and a bottle of aspirins in the kitchen,  but goes to the supermarket and pharmacy when these basics run out. So it was that  when, during the Renaissance the new studies in botany allowed the people to pack off all the utilitarian stuff to botanic gardens, no one missed it very much; the gardens could either be used for pleasure or, as now, sold to developers. Only the great estates with their hordes of servants could afford to maintain their privacy by self-sufficiency.  The tumbling of the walls[ix] allowed gardens to metaphorically unbuckle their belts and taking a deep breath, spread indefinitely. However this new-found freedom could be taken too literally; when Padua tried to set up its collection without walls, most of it disappeared over-night and the walls were hastily reinstated.  Now gardens, freed from all the internal divisions and other medieval clutter, could achieve a far greater harmony of design. Medieval gardens always seemed to be framed by sharp angles, but the French invasion of Italy in 1494 brought the first Italian gardener back over the Alps followed by Pacioli and Leonardo who introduced a more sophisticated geometry into garden design, arguably even inventing garden design itself. The Botanic garden of Padua was  based within a  circle whilst Pisa did the opposite by including elaborate circular designs within the classical rectangular structure.  In addition,  curtain hedging, sinuous knots, powered water features, and new concepts in hard landscaping, mainly concerning gradients and perspective appeared.

 Curiously amongst all this new-age thinking, herb garden design remained relatively untouched. Herb gardens, largely for reasons of practicality stayed as they always had been, fiddly, pedantically  laid out and totally uninspired   as the plants had to be arranged both for ready identification and ease of harvesting. As Colville has pointed out[x] the difference between Medieval and Renaissance gardens largely comes down to showing off, a purpose which however dear to the hearts of those bank-rolling the  new botanic gardens,  was tempered  by the reality stamped on them by those who had to teach in them. There can be no doubt whatever that Turner with his low-church pragmatism would have eschewed the wasting of space in his beds by edging  them with plants he disliked for the sake of appearances. For the same reason, he would have avoided all the features characteristic of Medieval gardens except perhaps where they could be employed in the creation of a micro-climate. It is no surprise that none of  names of the herbalists mentioned above, occurs in the index of Strong’s “The Renaissance Garden in England”[xi] whereas those of Leonardo, Mercogliano and Alberti do. To foist Medieval ideas on to  Turner and his colleagues is as clearly unrealistic as it is to associate them with garden design within their own age. All were plantsmen rather than aesthetes and  highly original thinkers with it. It therefore remains a dilemma for modern designers that the result of attempting to re-create something true to the spirit of  the great Renaissance herbalists is inevitably going to be very boring indeed. Naive attempts to titivate their gardens as a sop to the “garden make-over generation”  will have the illustrious ranks of Turner, Mattioli and Ghini inter al spinning in their graves. Fortunately other aspects of the Medieval-Renaissance transition period, notably the events of 1492-1494 followed by the brief Anglo-French rapprochement when Mary of York married Louis XII  affords designers an entire play-pen of flamboyant new ideas without getting bogged down amongst the puritanical herbalists. Landscapers embracing even a few of Ms Stokstad’s bad dreams, would give their gardens an appeal irresistible to the modern visitor.