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 · Ornament · Plans
The water chain
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.
At the Villa Lante, made for Cardinal Gianfrancesco Gambara, the water starts at the top of the garden in a rustic grotto, the Fountain of the Deluge, and runs down a stone channel with scrolled sides shaped like the claws of a crayfish (gambero, a pun on the cardinal’s name). It then passes the Fountain of the Giants, runs along a stone dining table with a trough down its middle to cool the wine, and ends in the square water parterre below the two casinos. The story told is of the Golden Age giving way to civilisation: water from a wild source is tamed step by step.
The same device appears at Caprarola above the Farnese palace, and the stepped chute reappears in the Mughal gardens of Kashmir as the chadar.
Related rules
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.
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.
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The water chain”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/catena-d-acqua. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.