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.
The secret garden
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.
The great Italian gardens were public in a sense: they were shown to guests and often open to visitors, and their programmes of statues addressed an audience. The giardino segreto was the opposite, a walled garden next to the owner’s rooms where he could read, walk and talk unseen. At Caprarola two square secret gardens adjoin the pentagonal palace, one for summer and one for winter, each reached from the owner’s apartment.
The secret garden kept the medieval hortus conclusus, the enclosed garden, alive inside the Renaissance plan. It is also the ancestor of the walled rooms of the Arts and Crafts garden.
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.
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The secret garden”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/giardino-segreto. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.