OBSERVATIONS : GARDENS : The Artist’s Eye : Tracing the History of the Garden Through Paintings

TREES PLAY SUCH a prominent part in the stories and pictures of Paradise that it is worth asking why. Their cool shade is always mentioned, of course, as is the beauty of their blossom and their delicious fruit, but they seem particularly appropriate to Paradise imagery for another reason. Trees are big--bigger than other plants in the garden and longer-lived. Unlike most flowers, they do not wither and die down every year. Their grand architecture stands comparatively unchanged in the garden at every season, exemplifying the eternal and the transient together in a particularly satisfying and striking way. The Greeks had their sacred groves, which sometimes served as temples without any structure except an altar.

It was Aphrodite who won the golden apple from Paris, and the garden of the Hesperides had its golden apples, too, well protected by the dragon, Ladon, who lay coiled around the tree trunk. We think of the apple tree ( Malus pumila ) as the tree of the Garden of Eden, perhaps because it has always been the most familiar fruit tree in the West, but the Bible does not tell us so; it says simply “the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” Often, indeed, the fruit trees of Paradise look more like orange trees, as do the beautiful glossy-leaved specimens in the two paintings by Giovanni di Paolo. The bitter Seville orange ( Citrus aurantium ) arrived in the 15th Century and in Flanders was known as the Chinese apple.

DURING THE19th Century, exploration of the globe and advances in the natural sciences led to changes in the image of Paradise. Christian Paradise, an idea already undermined during the increasingly secularized 18th Century, disappeared as a serious subject for artists. The vision of an ideal world--an earthly Paradise--as garden or field vanished as well and was replaced by pictures of wild or remote landscape. Artists such as Frederic Church and Martin Johnson Heade offered monumental scenes of nature untouched by man as new visions of a paradisiacal world. Gardens in art lost their mythical and religious significance and became everyday settings for plein-air artists to explore color harmonies and for anecdotal painters such as James Tissot to capture glimpses of contemporary life.

Darwin’s theory of evolution, with its perception of man’s ultimate tiny and transient role in the universe, sapped what power was left in the image of the Garden of Eden. By the early 20th Century, the perfect structure of flowers was no longer proof of a benevolent universe. The imposition of garden design on nature could no longer carry the conviction of man’s ability to order his surroundings harmoniously. Wild nature, now so quickly disappearing, began to be seen as the remnant of unattainable Paradise, as Paradise lost. Today, with the exploration of our psychological selves, it may be that the only true paradise left is the image we create in our minds, a new version of Milton’s “paradise within.” It is an image that nonetheless still seems to have real power to console and delight. Very subjective images in art, very private gardens in life, constitute our efforts to evoke Paradise in the world today.

LONG BEFORE FLOWER gardens existed, flowers were greeted with joy primarily because they were a sign that food was on the way. Men first gardened to feed themselves: Ornamental gardening and the craft of the gardener sprang from agriculture. The Greeks of Alcman’s time had the dilemma, still faced by subsistence farmers today, of what to do in spring if the old year’s harvest was exhausted: Eat the seed grain for next year’s crop or go hungry.

The stern necessities of the garden, as a place where food is grown and work is done, tend to be relegated to the borders and backgrounds of works of art. There are some exceptions. Medieval and Renaissance artists depicted the rural occupations of the months and seasons in often engaging detail. In the 19th Century, manual labor and the daily life of the working class--its dignity and difficulty--again became an accepted subject for artists with an emphasis on the task in hand rather than on the character of the worker.

POETS AND PAINTERS have made the pleasure gardens of kings more familiar to us than working gardens, as we should probably call the useful gardens for both vegetables and flowers made before 1700. (Kitchen gardens as such, set aside for vegetables and fruit alone, did not develop till about 1750, the day of the landscape garden, when cultivated plots were hidden behind walls away from the house.)

Roman kitchen gardens were filled with all kinds of vegetables and fruit; in the 1st Century BC, gardener and writer Columella grew 15 kinds of cabbage. Many writers, including Virgil and Cato, wrote about their simple country gardens, but no visual records of these survive. Described as mixed gardens of flowers, herbs and vegetables, they must have been very different from the elaborate Roman pleasure gardens seen in wall paintings from Pompeii.

During the Dark Ages such distinctions were lost. No pleasure gardens survived the fall of Rome, but the working garden continued to exist because everyone still had to eat. It is easy to imagine colorful, scented flowers, notably the rose, lily and iris, growing next to the vegetables and medicinal plants. Some techniques, such as grafting, and a few tools, notably the hand plow and the spade, survived the general loss of garden lore.

Of all gardens, the working garden has probably altered less than any other. Untended as it is, Joan of Arc’s plot in the 19th-Century picture by Jules Bastien-

Lepage mixes vegetables, flowers, fruit--and weeds--in a way that many contemporary gardeners will recognize.

As life in the Middle Ages became easier and more affluent, gardeners once again began to develop different kinds of gardens, and artists began to illustrate them more frequently. Given the prevailing taste among artists’ clientele for pictures of aristocratic pleasure gardens, it is surprising that so many images exist of practical gardens and gardeners at work.

THROUGHOUT THE Renaissance, images of working gardens, and of work in the garden, continued to look much alike. “Spring,” an engraving after De Vos, shows the same activities as the tapestry detail of April from the “Four Ages of Man.” De Vos even shows Alcinous’ grapes, growing up a trellis right next to last winter’s cabbages. But some changes have taken place. In De Vos’ farmyard is a pair of turkeys imported from America, at the time much rarer than the peacock staring at them from the fence. Of interest to the practical gardener is the man digging with a spade that has a “foot hole.” Every other gardening activity and tool shown by De Vos is the same as today’s: We still rake the seedbed to a silky brown carpet, smooth the earth over new seed with the back of a spade, transplant tender seedlings we have grown indoors, and hastily prune and tie up big climbers before they burst into uncontrollable leaf.

The generally unchanging nature of garden tools is surprising. Common garden tools recorded by artists and still in use today include hoes, mattocks, rakes, watering cans and baskets to lug things in.

Once the ground was cleared and plowed, the man with a spade could go to work. Spades have always been made in a variety of shapes, with pointed, round or square ends, depending on the job. The simplest spades were made of wood, but their cutting edges wore out quickly. The 16th-Century Iranian gardener pictured in a miniature from the “ Shah Nameh “ carries a truly elegant spade over his shoulder; the tapered metal blade is finished at the handle joint with a slender neck.

From “Pleasures of the Garden: Images from The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” by Mac Griswold. Copyright 1987 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Reprinted with permission.