Make your garden an outdoor living room.” This is the contemporary designer’s clarion call which heralds what is termed the new trend in garden art today.
And a ghostly gardener might, from some roof garden, some sun-warmed terrace or patio wall, send a whispered echoing question, “How new?”
The outdoor room of today is but the designer’s interpretation of the Spanish patio garden adapted to present-day American living.
Development Of The Spanish Patio
The Spanish patio, in turn, was a development of a roofless garden of ancient origin, once a common feature of houses all along the Mediterranean seaboard.
The plain, square internal courtyard surrounded by four house walls, open to the sky with a central fountain or marble basin, served as the Romans’ common meeting ground or living room.
Later, when the Arabs came to the rich Roman province of southern Spain, they brought Persian gardeners and Byzantine builders to create their palaces and pleasure grounds.
It was they who brought the patio to its classic perfection. Since it has been retained there with little alteration, it has long been recognized as Spain’s characteristic garden.
Spain shared this Arab gift with the Americas. The Spanish padres first brought their methods of planting and irrigation to the New World and taught Californians how to make their desert fertile.
There is something of Spain almost everywhere in the American southwest and through the south, in architecture, place names, and the names of plants and trees.
It runs from Mexico through Texas and the Deep South to New Orleans, northeast as far as Santa Fe, due north as far as San Francisco, and even as far north as the Pacific Northwest.
Extending the Patio Style Gardening
Now, through the knowledge of climatic control, outdoor lighting systems, and radiant heat for outdoor terraces, it is possible to extend the patio style of gardening to more northern climates.
Accordingly, it has become popularly adaptable throughout the East, West, North, and South.
The roof gardens of New York, the window box or line of potted plants along a wall, the small brick-paved courtyard, and the patio-type gardens all bear witness to the influence of Spanish gardens.
It is always something of an adventure to follow a river to its source. So, is it worthwhile to read in the original since almost always something is lost in translation?
This truth plus curiosity set me on a journey to see something of the Spanish patio in its context and discover, perhaps, what, if anything, had been lost by American interpretation.
Characteristics of Spanish Patio Garden
To me, color, simplicity, and the sound of falling water are the outstanding characteristics of the Spanish patio garden.
How surprising to find that green (green and then blue as a fairly close second) was the favorite color — much as the Spanish artist El Greco used green and blue in almost all his pictures.
There is no grass, yet green is paramount. There is the color blend of oriental carpet in tiled bench and inlaid pool; there is the sunlit brightness of gaily colored flowers, yet green predominates.
The brilliance of zinnia and geranium — scarlet, carmine, and gold; the yellow and gold of orange trees in fruit; the magenta and purple in petunia and bougainvillea; deep violet in heliotrope; lavender in wisteria and pale.
It is true that a later and less happy taste has been imposed on the part of the Alcazar in Seville, but much of the original remains untouched.
The splendid forecourt to Seville Cathedral is, however, compensation enough, for the Court of Oranges is still unharmed—white jasmine covering the inside walls, orange trees planted symmetrically, water from the fountains falling into the plain round basins and along criss-cross irrigation channels.
In Granada are the famous gardens of the Alhambra, a series of patio gardens with terraces to the pools and pavilions, brilliant, bold, and beautiful.
These are something like a prose prelude to the garden across the narrow valley—the Generaliffe, one of the world’s most beautiful gardens.
Use of Water
Here in this garden, the sound of water is perhaps even more arresting than the variety of interlacing green, and it has been said very truly that this garden, which the Spanish composer de Falla loved so well, comes nearer to music than any of the other arts.
Slender arching sprays in the main court rise from an avenue of tiny jets, falling into the center channel, which runs the entire patio length, connecting the two mirrors at either end.
Elsewhere, wide shallow basins in the plain, fluted form of an open lotus flower receive the water that rises from the bud jets or courses down along the open runnels of stairway balustrades.
It will not be over-fanciful, as you stay to watch the sunset from the Sultan’s Mirador and see the light fade from the towers of the Alhambra and the city lights come out in Granada far below, to imagine that in just such a setting centuries ago someone recounted those one thousand and one tales of the Arabian nights, all within the sound of the fountain.
There would be no gardens in California or Spain without abundant water use. Arab ingenuity devised a marvelous irrigation system of necessity and, by using fountains and water courses, added life and sound, beauty, and refreshment to their gardens.
To my mind, it is this triple use of water that has, in large measure, been lost in the American adaptation of the Spanish patio garden. True, the bathing pool represents the rectangular reflection pools, and there are some fountains, but not enough of them.
Planting For Fragrance
Finally, there is something else that the creators of those ancient gardens loved to use; something evocative and invisible, yet strangely powerful.
In Arabia, they understood better than the Western world something of the secret of perfume, planting deliberately for fragrance and color and texture.
Perhaps these gardens, more than any others, were intended to appeal to the senses: taste in the grape and fig; touch in the texture of green; perfume in heliotrope, in jasmine and rose; sound in the play of water; sight in the complete, satisfying whole.
44659 by Joan Parry