Edge the beds before the portico with box, clip box into figures of animals set facing one another, and in the garden beyond cut it into many shapes, even into the letters of the owner’s name.
Rules · Site · Plans · Ornament
The villa garden: porticoes, grottoes, evergreens in rows
Give the villa garden porticoes for sun and for shade, grottoes made in imitation of nature with tufa and shells, evergreens planted in straight rows at equal distances, and hedges of box; set vines on columns over the walks.
Alberti’s treatise of about 1450 treats the garden as part of the ornament of a private house. He follows the ancients closely: the house should stand on a gentle rise with a wide view, its garden should have covered walks for winter sun and summer shade, and grottoes should be lined with pumice or tufa and coloured with green wax to imitate moss. Trees are to be planted in rows and in matched lines, the evergreens (laurel, cedar, juniper) in circles or arcs; box should edge the beds and may spell the owner’s name, as Pliny says; and climbing vines should be trained over walks on marble columns.
The garden is thus an extension of the architecture, measured and set out with it. Alberti allows comic statues, which he says are not to be scorned in a garden, and asks for fragrant and medicinal herbs. Most of the parts of the Italian garden of the next century are already in his list.
Related rules
Lay the ideal garden out on a circular plan in concentric rings, woods outside, then meadows and orchards, then gardens of knots and clipped evergreens divided by walks, with water and the fountain of the goddess at the centre.
On a hillside, cut the garden into level terraces held by retaining walls, join them by stairs and ramps on a single axis that runs from the house, and lead water down the axis from level to level.
Bring water down a slope in a stepped stone channel whose scrolled sides break it into ripples and small falls, on the axis of the garden, so that the water itself becomes an ornament as it descends.
Beside the house, enclose a small garden with walls or high hedges for the owner’s private use, with flowers, herbs, fruit trees and a fountain, apart from the public garden on the axis.
Set a triglyph over the axis of every column and over the middle of every intercolumniation (or two, in a wider bay); make the metopes between them as wide as they are high.
axis spacing = n × (triglyph + metope) = n × 2½ M
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The villa garden: porticoes, grottoes, evergreens in rows”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/alberti-villa-garden. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.