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A formal garden in the Western gardening tradition[1]is a neat and ordered garden laid out in carefully planned geometric and symmetric lines. Lawns and hedges in a formal garden must always be kept neatly clipped. Trees, shrubs, subshrubs and other foliage are carefully arranged, shaped and continually trimmed. A French garden is a specific kind of formal garden, laid out in the manner of André Le Nôtre; it is centered on the façade of a building, with radiating avenues and paths of gravel, lawns, parterres and pools (bassins) of reflective water enclosed in geometric shapes by stone coping, with fountains and sculpture.
The simplest formal garden would be a box-trimmed hedge lining or enclosing a carefully laid out flowerbed or garden bed of simple geometric shape, such as a knot garden. The most elaborate formal gardens contain pathways, statuary, fountains and beds on differing levels.
The French formal garden had its origins in sixteenth-century Italian gardens such as Boboli Gardens behind Palazzo Pitti, Florence, laid out by a series of architect-designers for the Grand Duchess Eleanor of Toledo. The formal parterre of clipped evergreens was transferred to France, where some of the earliest formal parterres were those laid out at Anet. Claude Mollet, the founder of a dynasty of nurserymen-designers that lasted deep into the 18th century, introduced the formal parterre.
Features of a formal garden:
- terrace
- topiary
- statuary
- hedge
- bosquet
- parterre
- sylvan theater
- pergola
- pavilion
- landscaping
- garden design
Formal gardens were a feature of the stately homes of England from the introduction of the parterre at Wilton House in the 1630s until such geometries were swept away by the naturalistic landscape gardens of the 1730s, but perhaps the best-known example of a formal garden of gravel, stone, water, turf and trees with sculpture is at Versailles, which is actually many different gardens, laid out by André Le Nôtre. In the early eighteenth century, the publication of Dezallier d'Argenville, La théorie et la pratique du jardinage (1709) was translated into English and German, and was the central document for the later formal gardens of Continental Europe.
Formal gardening in the French manner was reintroduced at the turn of the twentieth century: Beatrix Farrand's formal gardens at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC and Achille Duchêne's restored water parterre at Blenheim Palace are examples of the modern formal garden. New York City’s Central Park features a formal garden in the Conservatory Garden at the northern sector.
- Blomfield, Reginald Theodore. The Formal Garden in England. Google Books
- San Juan
Notes
- ^ In Japanese gardening, the Zen garden of rocks, moss and raked gravel is a wholly separate concept of equally formal garden, without axial symmetry or other geometries.
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