"Du cloistre grand large et especieux
Que est carré, et, afin qu'il soit mieulx
A un prael, ou milieu, gracieux
Vert sans grappin
Ou a planté en my un très hault pin."
It was at this period, that of Saint Louis and the apotheosis of Gothic architecture, that France was at the head of European civilization, therefore in no way can her preëminence in garden-making be questioned.
The gardens of the Gothic era seldom surpassed the enclos with a rivulet passing through it, a spring, a pine tree giving a welcome shade, some simple flowers and a verger of fruit trees.
The neighbours of France were often warring among themselves but the Grand Seigneur here was settling down to beautifying his surroundings and framing his chateaux, manors and country-seats in dignified and most appealing pictures. Grass-plots appeared in dooryards, flowers climbed up along castle walls and shrubs and trees came to play a genuinely esthetic rôle in the life of the times.
An illustrious stranger, banished from Italy, one Brunetto Latini, the master of Dante, who had sought a refuge in France, wrote his views on the matter, which in substance were as above.
About this time originated the progenitors of the gloriettes, which became so greatly the vogue in the eighteenth century. Practically the gloriette, a word in common use in northern France and in Flanders, was a logette de plaisance. The Spaniards, too, in their glorietta, a pavilion in a garden, had practically the same signification of the word.
In the fourteenth century French garden the gloriette was a sort of arbour, or trellis-like summer-house, garnished with vines and often perched upon a natural or artificial eminence. Other fast developing details of the French garden were tree-bordered alleys and the planting of more or less regularly set-out beds of flowering plants.
Vine trellises and vine-clad pavilions and groves were a speedy development of these details, and played parts of considerable importance in gardening under the French Renaissance.
In this same connection there is a very precise record in an account of the gardens of the Louvre under Charles V concerning the contribution of one, Jean Baril, maker of Arlors, to this form of the landscape architect's art.
"Ornamental birds—peacocks, pheasants and swans now came in as adjuncts to the French land and water garden." This was the way a certain pertinent comment was made by a writer of the fifteenth century. From the "Ménagier de Paris," a work of the end of the fourteenth century, one learns that behind a dwelling of a prince or noble of the time was usually to be found a "beau jardin tout planté d'arbres à fruits, de legumes, de rosiers, orné de volières et tapisé de gazon sur lesquels se promènent les paons."