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Medieval Gardens

The term ‘garden’ refers to the ‘garth’, or enclosure, required around areas valued for their contents or their privacy. Every early garden manual starts with advice on how to form its defence, either by water, hedge or wall. Gardeners, those persons responsible for this protection and the care of whatever was inside, could at times be vineyard attendants, fruiterers, herb gardeners or makers of arbours.

The gardens of the Middle Ages treated below exclude the Islamic garden traditions of the Umayyad Caliphate which by 714 had conquered all of the Iberian peninsula except the northern coast, and the ensuing Caliphate of Cordoba. Cordoba itself was prominent in the Islamic Golden Age and Christian Europe owed much in science, medicine and botany to exchanges in times of peace. Muslim rule in Spain was not fully extinguished until 1492. Sicily too fell under Arab control until the Norman County of Sicily was established in 1071.

The Christian world included most of the territory of Europe, with its many languages and cultures, and yet the authority of the Pope, the multinational organisation of the religious houses and the dynastic links between the many ruling houses bound it together, despite the frequent squabbles, so that the culture of gardens was a largely shared tradition over the period.

The monastic and palatial records of European early medieval gardens suggest that they were principally for the growing of culinary or medicinal herbs. The concept of the garden of pleasure barely existed until the high middle ages, and when it did they were intended to provide rest and pleasures to the senses. It was only with the dawn of the Renaissance that the emphasis switched from relaxation to display. Sophisticated garden-making was already underway in the [[Italian renaissance garden] and the Gardens of the French Renaissance especially at the transition from the late middle ages to the Renaissance.

Meanwhile, lower down the social scale, English county quarter sessions would record a purchase of freehold land from the twelfth century via a fine of lands, and gardens were listed alongside messuages, and arable and woodland acreage, confirming that gardens were not just for high-status establishments but were increasingly normal accompaniments to those of rector, squire and farmer, contributing to the medieval diet. One study suggests that almost every cottage would have had a garden, however small, but most garden produce was for consumption rather than sale, which is why gardens appear infrequently in account books.

Knowledge of medieval gardens is hampered by the rarity of physical and archaeological remains; also by the paucity of reliable visual evidence. That which exists is principally from miniatures in illuminated manuscripts, few earlier than the fifteenth century. Most were intended to illustrate psalters and books of hours and were fanciful in nature, though sometimes with incidental realism. One of the most elaborate and topographically accurate was the Très riches heures du Duc de Berry of about 1410, illustrated by the Limbourg brothers. It depicts realistically several of the major chateaux of France. Another form of religious illustration was painted altarpieces, the most famous of which is the Ghent Altarpiece in Belgium which depicts bible scenes.

Some of the more popular medieval poems were also produced in illustrated form, and when printed books commenced they sometimes included prints. These are no more help in visualising medieval gardens, for similar reasons to the religious images, as the poetry was generally allegorical romance with visions of earthly paradise and promoting the code of chivalric honour, including courtly love.

The most famous and enduring poem with references to gardens was Roman de la Rose, composed around 1240 in France by Guillaume de Lorris and continued by Jean de Meun a generation later. Another thirteenth-century French poem, the Lai de l’Oiselet, was retold by John Lydgate as The Churle and the Bird. Rather later English poets included John Skelton who composed The Garlande of Laurell about 1495, first printed in 1523, and Stephen Hawes whose The Pastime of Pleasure includes a description of a garden, probably that at Richmond Palace.

These images and poetics may be of only limited help in visualising medieval gardens, but the miniatures illustrate their constructed elements and floristic content, whilst the poems provide English terms for them, bypassing the Latinised versions found in the account books.

Castle gardens

Many illuminated manuscripts show gardens of usually square beds in available locations within castle or palace walls and intended for choice plants. They were transient as they were remade annually in spring. Those plants that were to be re-used were grown in flowerpots and taken to a safe place in the autumn. These included trained bay trees, and, from the fifteenth century, the tender gilliflowers (known today as carnations).

Many, perhaps most, medieval castles and palaces had their gardens. In England we find the gardener at Havering Palace in Essex holding hereditary office in the early twelfth century. A garden at Woodstock Palace was maintained as a manorial obligation, for the service of tending it was attached to land nearby.

The surround to a whole garden might be just a simple hedge, in which case it would probably consist of pleached quickset (hawthorn), entwined with brambles and dog roses. A more decorative version might have eglantine (sweet briar).

If the area enclosed consisted of cultivated beds these would probably have been protected by posts and rails with a latticework infill. The white and red roses would most likely be found entwined in it. The beds grew herbs for the pot and for physick (medicine). They could also be annuals to which no use had yet been ascribed, but which were worth the trouble for the sake of their beauty. Some of the more traditional flowers such as the lily (a bulb) and the peony (a perennial) were, though, better admired in the herber growing through the grass.

The cultivated garden’s cycle was the same as in agriculture, the herbs being sown in April and harvested in the autumn. Over winter the garden would be dug over and manured, and then the garden was re-made every spring. Hence alleys and edges were annual. Pruned and clipped evergreen trees or shrubs, often sweet-bay, and sometimes trained into estrade shapes, could be grown in pots and plunged as the garden was re-made, only to be raised in the autumn and taken indoors away from the cold.

Records of royal gardeners at the Palace of Westminster begin in 1262, but end with a tenderer of the King’s Vine in 1366. The vineyard garden was adjacent to the extant Jewel Tower constructed in 1365 at the south—west corner of the palace precinct. Such gardens would be ornamental, combining pleasant alleys through tonnelles with productive vines overhead. Perhaps the abundance of miniatures depicting such scenes gives the impression that medieval gardens were perforce tightly constrained, but it is important to remember that the hortus conclusus was not the limit of recreational activity, especially for the menfolk.

Parks

The early medieval style of hunting was the unrestricted free chase through the forest, though this was a privilege restricted to the monarch and his followers. From the eleventh century parks began to be seen, enclosed by hedge, paling or wall, intended for the protection of the game from poachers. Larger ones could be many hundreds of hectares. Although parks are generally thought of as hunting reserves, they served a wider recreational purpose, and might have menageries and places of retreat with their own herbers.

Henry I of England considered Woodstock Palace the 'favourite seat of his retirement and privacy' and where from 1113 he enclosed a large park with a stone wall containing a variety of exotic animals. At Palermo around 1150 the Norman King Roger II of Sicily, started a vast park enclosed by a stone wall within a series of pavilions was served by water brought by underground conduits and then conducted from one pool to another. These were much influenced by Islamic architecture and there could be found orange trees and peacocks. By 1166, though at a much smaller scale, Henry II of England created a series of three pools below a spring close to Woodstock Palace and to which were attached cloisters and other buildings.

Robert II, Count of Artois, who had strong connections with Sicily, added a park of 800 Hectares to his chateau at Hesdin from 1288. It acquired many ornamental features. A ‘petit Paradis’ under the walls contained osiers, vines, roses and lilies. There were orchards of apple, cherry, plum and pear trees and slightly further away a menagerie. The most elaborate area was the further part, with pools and a sizeable pavilion. The bridge to it was lined with marionettes of monkeys covered in badger skin and there were bowers, a hut that could turn to avoid the wind, a rose garden and water-spouting devices. Hesdin remained famous for two and a half centuries.

In his book on husbandry, Liber Ruralium Commodorum, written about 1300, Pietro de' Crescenzi envisaged larger gardens as small parks with ‘a fountain flowing through all its parts and places’, aviaries and numbers of stags, roebucks, hares and rabbits. He advised woodland as shelter to the north of a residence, and an open meadow (known in English as a ‘lawn’) to the south so that the animals could be seen from the palace windows. In this spirit Galeazzo Visconti II of Milan enclosed Visconti Park adjacent to Pavia Castle from the 1360s. Its 2,200 hectares was devoted to entertainment, including tournaments, picnic expeditions, hunting and horse racing.

Retreats away from the stresses of court life were often sought. At Sheen Palace near London, Richard II of England formed one on an island in the Thames in the late fourteenth century. Like Everswell before, and the Kenilworth Pleasance after, it stood in a line of retreats from the pressures of court life.

Half a century later, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and brother of Henry V, rebuilt the manor house at Greenwich, on the Thames downstream from London, and enclosed a park of 188 acres. He renamed it the ‘Manor of Bella Court’ (later the Palace of Placentia) for its delightful situation.

The deer park has been extensively studied in Britain, and it has become clear that it was multi-purpose. Some of the smallest parks were effectively pleasure grounds, while gardens could themselves be attached to lodges in parkland. So-called ‘little parks’ were often located close to, or under the walls, of the castle. These appear to have preserved or created appropriate settings, and provided venues for entertainments. The inner park at Clarendon Palace, in place by 1265, and the Little Park at Windsor of 1360, are examples. Parks and little parks may have been embellished but one cannot see them as ‘designed’ in the modern sense.

Herbers and arbours

The usual term for a pleasure garden was viridarium (green place), though viretum (greensward) was sometimes used. The English equivalent was ‘herber’ (‘herbarium’ in dog Latin, such as in the accounts), which was turfed and not the equivalent of a ‘herb garden’. This form of garden is mentioned in France from the mid twelfth century and is familiar from numerous medieval miniatures.

Viridaria had trees but must be distinguished from fruit orchards (pomerium, vergier) where the emphasis was on production rather than delight. Nevertheless the spectacle of the flowering of cherries and pears en masse was prized.

A viridarium might fit within some architectural arrangement but there was no expectation that it would be a perfect geometrical figure – that imperative was to arise in the late fifteenth century in Italy. In 1195-6 an herber was made at great cost in the Upper Ward at Windsor Castle. Even more elaborate were the pleasure gardens, along with menageries and model farms, created at a series of castles in Apulia in the 1230s and 1240s built by Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, and grandson of Roger II of Sicily.

Henry III of England commanded the bailiff to make an herber round the ponds at Everswell at Woodstock in 1239. In 1251 he was to make two good high walls round the queen's garden with an herber by the king's stew in which she could walk. The herber was then turfed, and two years later a hundred pear trees were ordered.

A description of how to form a viridarium was provided by Albertus Magnus in a section on ‘De plantionibus viridariorum’ of about 1260. One would level the ground, sterilise it with boiling water, lay turf, tamp it down and plant it around the edges with taller flowers and ornamental trees. Smaller flowers could be dug out of meadows and planted as plugs into the sward, giving the mille-fleur or flowery mead effect, and later in the year the grass would be supressed by rolling. The trees would be planted for shade and delight, as well as their fruit. Shade-giving structures within the herber could be adorned with climbers.

This advice was borrowed by Pietro de’ Crescenzi of Bologna shortly after 1300 for a chapter in his Liber Ruralium Commodorum. This latter work, giving advice on the many aspects of managing a rural estate, and citing Latin authors, was translated into French in 1373 and went into print from 1471, to become a popular manual.

The more prominent plants that lent the herber its character were often the ancestors of common garden plants used today - violets, heartsease (pansy), daisies, strawberries (wild), cowslips, periwinkle, rose campions and wild red campions. Around the edges one might find taller bulbs and roots, including roses, the Madonna lily (bulbs sold by the quart), borage, stocks, wallflowers, purple fleur-de-lys, hollyhocks, ‘female’ peonies, columbine, marigold and lavender.

Fruit trees that were planted into the turf might include the Pearmain and Costard cooking apples, or cooking pears such as Caillou Rosat (Rosy pebble) and Pesse-pucelle. There might be the bullace plum, sweet cherries, (black) mulberries, medlars, peaches, quince, and service trees. Filberts (a type of hazel) were common, walnut trees less so. Shrubs valued for being evergreen were juniper and savin.

Vineyards flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in southern England. Outside the walls of Windsor Castle Henry I acquired 5½ acres in about 1110 for a ‘Great Garden’ reached by a bridge over the moat. It was a vineyard, and replanted as such by Henry III of England from 1239. Sheen was much favoured by Edward III of England who ordered a vineyard garden to be made 1358—61.

There are signs in the fourteenth century that the standard form of the ‘herber’ was changing. Two factors seem to have been in play. Colder climatic conditions set in during the fourteenth century and vineyards declined as commercial enterprises, though vines remained in decorative contexts, for example growing on trellises in herbers. Second, fruit had an increasingly important place at the high-status table in the same century. Apples, pears, cherries, damsons fetched good prices and were traded by fruiterers. Orchards (vergiers) multiplied, and some orchards were even protected by moats.

Fruit and nut trees, formerly planted randomly in open grass, were henceforward seen in larger and more specialised orchards. The herber then became a garden construction of withy or timber, often incorporating turf seats, and over-arched to become tunnels with sanded alleys, and then elaborated with aviaries to bring birdsong into the garden. The material of an arbour was usually willow, and planted over with climbers. These could be (white) bryony or honeysuckle, but the tradition was vines. An alternative to willow since Classical times was suckers of ‘English elm’ which will root themselves readily when plunged into the ground. In French arbours and bowers were referred to as ‘treilles’ or ‘tonnelles’. In English the word ‘herber’ mutated through changes in spoken English into ‘arbour’.

John Lydgate, a prolific poet from the first half of the fifteenth century, described a herber/arbour with bench seats and a fountain: Alle the aleis were made playne with sond, The benches turved with newe turvis grene, Sote herbers, with condite at the honde, That wellid up agayne the sonne shene, Lyke silver stremes as any christalle clene...

Pools and moats

Whether a luxury for its scarcity, as in Sicily, or a practicality because of its abundance, as in England, water was a much desired decorative element in medieval gardens and parks.

Fishponds, and sometimes chains of them, were a familiar element of monastic sites. In the secular context, pools were part of the pleasure complex at Hesdin. In England there were pools and also broad sheets of water favoured for aesthetic reasons at several places from the 1290s if not before, for example Leeds Castle in Kent and Framlingham Castle in Suffolk. Perhaps the largest was at Kenilworth Castle. By 1389 the names of bridges and gates make it clear that the great lake was then existing.

All earthen motte and bailey castles had moats, though later ones tended to be built on rock or in stone and had a dry moat at best. The phenomenon of the semi-defensive moated manor house arose, especially in England, where many thousands of moats were dug between 1250 and 1400, though they continued to be created at high-status places during the sixteenth century. They had a number of pleasing advantages, even if none would have been decisive by itself. They were ornamental. They could drain surrounding lands. They gave an aura of dignity and semblance of fortification, even if sometimes only three sides were excavated. They were profitable as fisheries. They provided a barrier providing everyday security, as well as marking out the lord’s private domain.

Occasionally one finds a double moat, such as at that at Peterborough Abbey constructed in 1302 around an herber. Another was made around ‘le plesans en marais’ that Henry V of England ordered to be made in 1414-7 on the far side of the lake by Kenilworth Castle.

There were also twin or paired moats, though it is usually impossible to know whether the second moated area was for extra buildings, or for gardens, as one suspects at the surviving one at Helmingham Hall in Suffolk.

Walls within such moats could be truly defensive, or tricked up to appear so. Bodiam Castle around 1385 had thin but battlemented walls and was set in a moat large enough to class as a mere. The romance of the embattled look should not be underestimated.

Some bishops elaborated their palaces with large areas of water, as did the aristocrats. At the Bishop’s Palace, Wells, surviving walls enclosing a large garden were constructed in 1341 with a wide moat outside.

The medieval pleasure garden

Fountains, ‘the fountain of life’, were sometimes seen at the centre of monastic cloisters, also in civic contexts. Albertus Magnus wrote of viridaria around 1260 that ‘no trees must be planted in the middle of the turf… if possible, a clear fountain in a stone basin should be in the midst, for its purity gives much pleasure’. There are numerous examples of such fountains enlivening illuminated manuscripts but they were probably less common in practice.

The familiar southern Italian courtyard with pools or fountains in the midst of flower-studded grass, vine pergolas and shaded walks is well recorded from the thirteenth century. Sometimes they included loggias for outside seating or dining. Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione (1342) related how the royal gardens between Castel Nuovo in Naples and the sea were filled with sculpture. The mythical Daedalus created the labyrinth for Minos, King of Crete. Another was made for Robert II’s daughter outside the park at Hesdin in 1311 with a central turret. The Hôtel Saint-Pol in Paris acquired another around 1370. Duke René of Anjou made his own at his residence at Baugé, in the Loire valley, in 1477. He was also famous for his gardens, with their tonnelles, aviaries and pavilions, and his promotion of horticulture, introducing the mulberry] to his lands in Provence, and the carnation to Anjou. He spent his final years up till 1480 in his garden at Aix-en-Provence where he enjoyed his ‘grand gallerie’.

Other galleries had been seen at the Hôtel Saint-Pol where in 1360 Charles V of France built some, supported by pillars, to surround orchards and vineyards. Other spaces were surrounded by tonnelles covered with vines and with pavilions at corners. In the middle of the central space was a bason of marble with water spurting from lions’ mouths. The gardens of the Alcázar of Seville, created by Peter of Castile in 1364-6, had wall-walks on arches.

Galleries were seen in other French gardens, and the fashion spread to England. One was made at Greenwich overlooking a hedged garden with an arbour for the Queen, a daughter of René of Anjou, to sit in. In the 1500s Henry VII of England created new gardens at Richmond Palace entirely surrounded by galleries supported by oak posts. The last flourish of the gallery was perhaps at Thornbury Castle, Gloucestershire, prior to 1520 where stone-built ones overlooked enclosed gardens; nearby was a magnificent herber, also one of the last.

Mounts, mazes and knots

Assertions that mounts, mazes and knots were medieval garden features have frequently been made though without corroboration from archive or archaeology. Until late in the nineteenth century the history of gardens was an assemblage of ‘gleanings’ from literary sources, a prime example being John Claudius Loudon, who included a ‘brief outline of the progress of the ancient style in England’ in his Encyclopædia of Gardening (1822) which attempted to define and date ancient garden features.

Alicia Amherst mostly followed Loudon. Sir Frank Crisp then made strenuous efforts to support both in his Mediæval Gardens (1924) but had to admit that he found no evidence amongst his numerous images from illuminated manuscripts of medieval mounts, mazes or knots. His images amply demonstrated that turfed benches, lattice-work fences, the flowery mead, fountains and the arbour belonged to his period, but he was perhaps too easily persuaded of the antiquity of other features.

Loudon had indeed generated several blunders. He thought that Leland’s Itinerary was ‘published towards the end of the fifteenth century’, but it was composed half a century later. The snail-mount at Marlborough, Wiltshire (actually Neolithic), cut with a spiral path in the seventeenth century, was offered as a surviving example of a late medieval mount. Crisp’s search for mediæval garden mounts turned out to be fruitless.

Rosamund Clifford, Henry II’s mistress, dwelt in a bower at Woodstock, but (the story goes) she was tracked down and given the choice of poison or a dagger by the jealous queen. Amherst mistakenly remarked that ‘in reality labyrinths were by no means uncommon’ in the reign of Henry II of England. She ascribed great antiquity to mizmazes, and the conception of them as authentic folk devices with origins in deep history, lives on, but the plain fact is that no English garden mazes, or rural ones, can be cited with certainty before the late sixteenth century. Crisp confessed in relation to labyrinths: ‘As with topiary-work no illustrations are recorded until after the Middle Ages had passed’, despite literary references to dédales.

In arguing for an early date for knot gardens Loudon drew attention to the parterre designs depicted by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau (in the 1570s), and supposed that ‘scarcely a ground-plot [was] not laid out as a parterre or labyrinth’. He had understood that du Cerceau dated from ‘the time of Henry III’. A king of this name certainly reigned in England in the mid-thirteenth century, but Loudon’s source, Horace Walpole, was actually referring to Henri III of France who reigned three centuries later! But Crisp had convinced himself that ‘Knots were distinctly mediæval in their origin...’. On the other hand they were already well established in Italy and France during the fifteenth century.

There was a medieval Italian word for designing textiles with interweaving threads or ribbons - ‘innodature’ - which was adopted for similar designs in garden beds. The English equivalent ‘knot’ had a broader meaning as any form of intricate work. Harvey made very little mention of garden knots, but he understood that ‘as early as 1494 “A knot in a garden, called a mase” was an understood commonplace...’. His source was Robert Fabyan’s Chronicles, as slightly misdated in the Oxford English Dictionary. Fabyan composed his work from 1502, with publication in 1516. In fact, the first convincing reference to any form of English garden knot occurs in the 1500s, in a poem probably descriptive of Richmond Palace.

Notes

 	Colvin 1986, 12-3.
 	For example see Staffordshire Historical Collections, vols III, IV, XI, XII, etc.
 	Dyer, Christopher (1987) ‘Gardens and Orchards in England in the middle Ages’, in Flaran 9: Jardins et Vergers en Europe occidentale (VIII – XVIII siecles), ed. Charles Higounet, Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi
 	Creighton 2009, 45.
 	Harvey 1981, 98.
 	Skelton, J. (1843) The Poetical Works of John Skelton: with notes, edited by A. Dyce, 2 vols, London: Thomas Rodd.
 	Keay and Watkins 2013, 
 	Creighton 2009, 45.
 	Harvey 1981, 10 & 60.
 	Victoria County History, Oxfordshire, vol. XII, 435-9.
 	Harvey 1981, 155-6.
 	Colvin (ed.) , vol. 1, 534-5.
 	Creighton 2009, 45.
 	Colvin 1986, 18.
 	Masson 1966, 48.
 	Colvin 1986, 18.
 	Hagopian van Buren 1986, 118.
 	Masson 1966, 55-6.
 	Creighton 2009, 134-9, 224
 	Harvey 1981, 4, 10.
 	Masson 1966, 64.
 	Hope 1913, 24, 82, 70.
 	Masson 1966, 50.
 	Calendar of Liberate Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office: Henry III, vol. III [1245-51], 292.
 	Harvey 1981, 6, has a translation of Albertus Magnus’s description of the viridarium.
 	Crisp 1924, 15.
 	Hope 1913, 70.
 	Harvey 1981, 87, 114 & 157.
 	Harvey 1981, 2; Creighton 2009, 74.
 	Creigjhton 2009, 75.
 	Lydgate (1840), 179–193., 181.
 	Creighton 2009, 88-95.
 	Creighton 2009, 77-87.
 	Keay and Watkins 2013, 33.
 	Harvey 1944, 96.
 	Jacques 2024, xx.
 	Harvey 1981, 13, 85.
 	Colvin 1986, 11; Harvey 1981,107.
 	Jacques 2024, xxi.
 	Miller Naomi (1986) ‘Paradise Regained: Medieval Garden Fountains’, Medieval Gardens, ed. E. MacDougall, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture IX, 135-154, Washington, D.C.
 	Harvey 1981, 6.
 	Masson 1966, 52.
 	Hagopian van Buren 1986, 122.
 	Woodbridge 1986, 21.
 	Sauval 1724, II, 283-4; Woodbridge 1986, 17.
 	Harvey 1981, 45.
 	Harvey 1981, 135.
 	Jacques 2024, 7-8.
 	Jacques 2024, xxi-xxiv.
 	Loudon 1822, 64, 65 & 68; Crisp 1924, 58 & 84.
 	Amherst 1895, 35.
 	Crisp 1924, 70 & 79.
 	Walpole, Horace (1876) Anecdotes of painting in England…with additions by the Rev. James Dalloway, 3 vols, edited by R. Wornum, London: Chatto & Windus, vol. III, 71; Crisp 1924, 70 & 78-9.
 	Segre, A. (1998) ‘Untangling the knot: Garden design in Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’, Word & Image, XIV/1–2, 84–110., 91-3.
 	Harvey 1981, 112.

Sources

• Amherst, Alicia (1895) A History of Gardening in England, London: Bernard Quaritch.
• Colvin, Howard (1986) ‘Royal Gardens in Medieval England’, Medieval Gardens, ed. E. MacDougall, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture IX, 7–22, Washington, D.C.
• Creighton, Oliver (2009) Designs upon the Land: Elite landscapes of the Middle Ages, Woodbridge: Boydell Press.
• Crisp, Frank (1924) Mediæval Gardens… with some Account of Tudor, Elizabethan and Stuart Gardens, London: The Bodley Head.
• Hagopian van Buren, Anne (1986) ‘Royal Gardens in Medieval England’, Medieval Gardens, ed. E. MacDougall, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture IX, 115-34, Washington, D.C.
• Harvey, John (1981) Mediaeval Gardens, London: Batsford.
• Hope, W.H. St John (1913) Windsor Castle: An Architectural History, 2 vols, London: Country Life.
• Jacques, David (2024) Tudor and Stuart Royal Gardens, Oxford: Windgather Press
• Keay, Anna & John Watkins (2013) The Elizabethan Garden at Kenilworth Castle, Swindon: English Heritage, 155-63.
• Loudon, John Claudius (1822) An Encyclopædia of Gardening, London: Longman et al.
• Lydgate, J. (1840) ‘The chorle and the bird’, Early English Poetry, vol. II, Selection from the Minor Poems of Dan John Lydgate, edited by J. Orchard Halliwell, London: Percy Society, 179–193.
• Masson, Georgina (1966) Italian Gardens, London: Thames & Hudson
• Sauval, Henri (1724) Histoire et recherches des antiquités de la ville de Paris, 2 vols.
• Woodbridge, Kenneth (1986) Princely Gardens: The origins and development of the French formal style, London: Thames & Hudson.