MEDIÆVAL GARDENS
no easy matter, if we may judge from the vivid description to be found in Huon de Bordeaux, a poem concerning a Bordelais lord of the ninth century. After sundry adventures, Huon sets out on a journey to Babylon, and seeks an audience with the Emir. He tells of his arrival at what he describes as the castle, and how, after long parley with the porter, the drawbridge is let down and the great gate opened, and he finds himself in an arched way, with a series of portcullises showing their teeth overhead. After further parley, and further opening of gates, he enters a large courtyard, and goes thence into the garden, which is planted with every kind of tree, aromatic herb, and sweet-scented flower. In the garden is a fountain with its little channelled way, supplied with water from the Earthly Paradise. This description may seem a little fantastic, but it is only the poet's way of telling us what we might ourselves experience if we would go in imagination to some thirteenth- or fourteenth-century castle, and seek to gain admittance.
Sometimes the garden was within the castle fortifications. It was then necessarily circumscribed, and would, more or less, be laid out with formal pathways and stone-curbed borders, also with trees cut in various devices (a reminder of Rome's once far-reaching influence), and a tunnel or pergola of vines or sweet-scented creepers running the length of the wall to form a covered walk for shelter against sunshine or
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