MAKING A SPLASH WITH WATER IN OUR GARDENS

With the recent heatwave, we’ve thought more, perhaps, about the value of water; and water in gardens is something that has occupied many throughout the ages.

In the deserts of what we now call the Middle East water was precious and your wealth was showed as much as by the amount of water you could command as by gold or land. So it was inevitable that the elite showed off with pools of water; Egyptian wall paintings show us that, even five-and-a-half millennia ago, gardens were provided with pools complete with fish and lotus blossoms and were surrounded with protective walls.

Roman town houses kept the same idea – pools with columned, shaded walks; in the country, though, things were different. Pliny the Younger had a garden in the Tuscan hills where water flowed freely; in one of his letters he described ‘a cascade, which entertains at once both the eye and the ear; for the water, dashing from a great height, foams over the marble basin which receives it below’. The Emperor Hadrian’s garden at Tivoli has plenty of water, both formal and informal, like his so-called Maritime Theatre, with a canal encircling a private retreat.

Persian carpets show their gardens in map form, showing arcade-surrounded gardens, with the play of cool water and softening planting, with the regular pools and the flower beds around them. This was what we would call a Paradise – our word comes from an old Persian term meaning enclosure; and there are links with the Garden of Eden, too, for the Book of Genesis, which has its parallel in the Koran, tells us that four rivers flowed out of Eden – and such Arabic gardens were nearly always divided into four parts by channels of water.

Water plays an important part in Christian sites, too, often with a well in the centre of a monastic cloister. At Canterbury Cathedral in the 12th century Prior Wilbert arranged for water to be supplied into two cloisters, both with multi-lobed basins in them, and a still-surviving water tower that provided pressure.

Medieval manuscripts often show walled gardens with elaborate fountains; a late example is the Venus fountain at Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire. There was little to match the Italians, though, whose use of water in gardens was spectacular.

The Villa d’Este at Tivoli, laid out between 1560 and 1575 by Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, is well-known for its many fountains, but it was the cascades that were the most impressive feature. One of the earliest cascades is to be found at the Villa Lante near Viterbo in Italy. The garden there was laid out by the architect Vignola for Cardinal Gambara, from 1566. The cascade, on a gentle slope, has an elaborately-sculpted channel – the curls on its side are said to represent crayfish – a pun on the Cardinal Gambara’s name; crayfish in Italian is ‘gambero’.

Many others copied the Cardinal – at the Palazzo Farnese and the Villa Aldobrandini, two more cardinals’ palaces. The English diarist John Evelyn visited the latter and wrote that it was ‘one of the most delicious places I ever beheld for its situation, elegance, plentiful water, groves, ascents and prospects.’

So it’s not surprising that some British aristocrats wanted their own cascades. One that has long vanished was at Dyrham Park in south Gloucestershire. It was designed for William Blathwayt, William III’s Secretary of State, and was complete by 1704. It was designed by the architect William Talman and the King’s gardener, George London. The water came down the hill on 244 steps and, apparently, under the house.

Britain’s best-known surviving cascade is at Chatsworth in Derbyshire. It was laid out in 1694, then made longer and wide four years later. The temple at the top was added in 1711 to a design by Thomas Archer. Thirteen years later, Daniel Defoe visited; he wrote, ‘a whole river descends the slope of a hill a quarter of a mile in length, over steps, with a terrible noise and broken appearance.’

The longest cascade in Britain, though, was at Stanway in Gloucestershire, put in place in the 1720s. Now in the process of restoration, its lower cascade is 623 feet long, and falls 123 feet from the pyramid at the top. This is, though just a part of it; behind the pyramid was another cascade, at least a quarter of a mile long. There are hopes of eventual restoration of that, too.

Cascades were soon thought to be unnatural, as the craze for turning to nature for inspiration in the garden was coming in at the start of the 18th century. Water was soon allowed to run feely and take natural shapes – as the garden writer Horace Walpole said, it was ‘adieu to canals, circular basons and cascades tumbling down marble steps. The gentle stream was taught to serpentine seemingly at its pleasure.’

And not just gentle streams. At Hackfall, William Aislabie’s woodland garden was intended to look as natural as possible, but was augmented by new features, like the Forty Foot Fall, tumbling down the hillside; it fed from a specially-constructed lake on the hilltop. It was all a far cry form the formality of the geometric lakes and straight canals of his father’s Studley Royal.

A modern take on the traditional cascade and with a nod to the water works at the Villa d’Este is the garden at Alnwick Castle, designed by Jacques and Peter Wirtz and opened in October 2001. It attracts thousands of visitors each year; the fountains are timed to play in different patterns.

Modern engineering has allowed designers to use water in widely imaginative ways – tumbling fountains, mirror pools, channels swiftly gushing, steams slowly meandering. All can take us back both to the preciousness of water in our distant past and to the imaginative ways that, throughout history, we have made ornamental use of this wonderful gift.

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