An Italian garden under construction

My friend, Florence and her husband Howard are  creating an Italian garden just a few blocks away from my place.  It'll be great to follow their progress!  Last year, there was heavy equipment amongst piles of dirt and stones; now the garden is beginning to take shape. 

The scale here is really grand.  The statues beneath the arches are larger than life sized (about 10 feet or so tall.)

 

Florence wrote the following few paragraphs about her garden.  I especially love the third paragraph.   

I searched and researched for months and years to figure out what I wanted to do with that lot next to my house. I studied English Landscape gardens, cottage gardens, French Renaissance gardens (which were a spin off of the Italian) and and of course Italian Renaissance. Nothing really clicked until we visited Villa La Pietra north of Florence Italy.

Although the gardens were many in that villa... they were separated like rooms in a house. We wandered from one to another each with its own personality but interestingly  cohesive. I took tons of pictures and set out to try and capture the feeling that I had experienced when visiting that particular garden.

I analyzed what that garden had to teach me. Although it inspired me to pursue the Italian theme, but I did learn this: A garden lives by virtue of the gardener's presence. When that presence is felt, the visitor emerges in a state of awareness, the gardener's love somehow assumed. When it's not, he's sadly aware of its absence. More important than filling my garden with objects, statuary and urns, fountains or topiary, I'd fill it with the presence of my commitment.

As far as the logistics of the form that the garden is patterned after..it goes back to the medieval cloister garden..  A picture  that I found was taken at the turn of the century, when such convents still housed the hooded monks; one of them as shown at work here among the aromatic and medicinal herbs these disciplined, highly cultured men once grew. Usually bordered with loggia of stone columns and arches, this vestige of early Christian times and was laid out in the shape of a cross

When I saw Villa La Pietra, I recognized that it was laid out like the medieval garden, in fact, with its Islamic roots, that had inspired the more elaborate Italian gardens of the 15th and 16th C. An allegorical scheme derived from ancient myth, the cruciform plan speaks of the four sacred elements of earth, fire, air,  and water; of the four river heads whose source was Eden; of the four quadrants of the universe out of whose center a spring bubbles forth...fertility, eternity, life. The pure quadripartite layout that we see in the interior courtyards of so many early Renaissance palaces. 

Although it is fascinating to know the provenance of the design, my garden is not an original idea. Originality, for originality's sake is the last effect I'd care to seek. I'm after nostalgia, deja vu. I want visitor to have the sense, entering my garden , that he's come to a passage of forgotten experience, that he's seen it all somewhere before, I want the visitor to be reassured, calm,  and not challenged.  I truly want it to be a "pleasure garden".