Garden Art in European Culture: The Garden as A Form of Representing Socioeconomic Status

Julian Huertas

5 February 2015

Professor Musgrave

Garden Art in European History

Blog Post One:

Why Do You Think Gardens Have Always Been an Intrinsic Part of European Culture?

There are several reasons why gardens may have always been an intrinsic part of European culture. These reasons may range from the garden being a form of romantic escape, pleasure, consolation, morality, or hunting grounds. Other reasons may be the garden as acting as a way of boasting of socioeconomic status or as way of practically growing fruits and cultivating grapes for wine. For this blog post, however, I believe that gardens have always been an intrinsic part of European culture primarily because it is a way of representing socioeconomic status.

One of the most famous examples of this type of garden is that of Louis XIV at the Palace of Versaille, created at the end of the 17^th century. Heavily manicured with trees, shrubs, fountains, and a central canal, the garden is one of the most heavily ornamented in the world. It is symmetrical due to its central axis, which is more than a mile-long. The garden corresponds to the heavily ornamented Palace of Versailles and is a clear statement of wealth and opulence for France.

A secondary example of the garden as a manifestation of wealthy socioeconomic status is that of the peristyle garden in Roman villas. Wealthy Roman families would have this garden in the interior courtyard of the house. Peristyle gardens were formal, another term for symmetrical, and typically had frescoes on the walls, herms, topiaries, fountains, and sculpture within the garden. They were used for relaxing or hosting social events. Many lower and middle-class Roman families did not have peristyle gardens. Naturally, the larger the peristyle for upper-class families revealed the more wealth a family had. The House of the Vettii in Pompeii exemplifies a wealthy family with a peristyle garden. This garden had topiary, flowers, fountains, shrubs, sculpture, frescoes, and a walkway for the family in the mid-First century BCE.

In modern society, gardens can demonstrate the socioeconomic status of a family but not entirely in the same way as in the past. In the United States wealthier suburban communities have more room for lawns and yards in which gardens can be cultivated and designed. Communal gardens are becoming increasingly popular in both suburbs and cities. These gardens are not so much to represent socioeconomic status, but are contemporarily being used as teaching tools. These gardens educate about the health benefits of plants, develop the idea of cultivating and caring for one’s own garden, and keep urban children from participating in more dangerous activities. I have pasted a link below with a list of urban garden projects in New York City. As the modern trend of people increasingly moving into cities continues, the idea of the garden as a form of socioeconomic status representation may or may not remain. This leads to the question: could the concept of a garden as largely a representation of socioeconomic shift to the concept of a garden largely being used to educate?

Here is a link with several urban garden projects in New York City: http://ecowatch.com/2013/11/08/urban-farming-projects-new-york-city/