Garden

The people of ancient Egypt understood that by controlling the Nile River and the agriculture dependent upon it, they might impose order on the primordial chaos that was always a potential threat. Egyptian garden paintings, the world's earliest, show geometry and symmetry as the formal indications of this valuable foundation of such order. These early images show rectangular pools filled with fish, ducks, and lotus surrounded by regularly spaced fruit trees—emblematic of an ideal of the good life as it exists around the world.

The idea of the garden as a place where order is imposed upon an inherently chaotic, disorderly, painful, and dangerous natural world is central to ancient Egyptian, Persian, Islamic, European, and European-American concepts of the garden. The noted landscape gardener Lancelot "Capability" Brown (1715–1783), famous for designs of gardens that looked liked natural landscape, considered his efforts as improvements on the natural state (as well as on the rigid and geometric designs of previous gardenists); even nineteenth-century Romantic-era gardens, which thrived on the appearance of disorder, were carefully planned.

Related to the idea of an order that provides for humanity—and to the idea of the garden as a triumph over death—is the idea of the garden as a site of never-ending bounty, never failing with the seasons. This idea is more common in India and the monotheistic Middle East, Europe, and America. Homer described the garden of Alcinous, king of the Phaeceans, in The Odyssey (book vii): "and verdant olives flourish round the year. / The balmy spirit of the western gale / eternal breathes on fruits untaught to fail." Chinese and especially Japanese gardens differ in being more likely to celebrate the different beauties of the several seasons.

France. Veue Generale de Chantilly du cote de l'Entrée by Adam Perelle, 1650. A European villa garden. DUMBARTON OAKS, RESEARCH LIBRARY AND COLLECTION, WASHINGTON, D.C.

European villa gardens, of both the informal "pastoral" and the more formal French types, reflected instantiate the notion of the garden as a place of plenty by extolling the ideal of a close relationship to agriculture. Often this closeness was literal: gardens were situated within the larger farm, and might include (geometric) herb gardens, grape arbors, or symmetrically planted fruit groves; adjacent fields were actively cultivated.