User:Johnbod/Medieval garden

The medieval garden in Europe covers ornamental and kitchen gardens, including medicinal and herb gardens, as opposed to the growing of plants in medieval agriculture, which was the mainstay of the economy throughout the period. Ornamental gardening seems to have developed slowly during the Early Middle Ages, although it is clear from medieval art that people were very appreciative of the beauty of plants and flowers. By the end of the Middle Ages, the number of plants available to gardeners was increasing, and the wealthy expected to have a garden in houses outside the inner city, and some inside it. Smaller gardens still seem to have mixed vegetables, herbs, whether for medicine of flavour in cooking, and garden plants grown purely for ornament. Many popular plants were useful for more than one of these purposes.

A consistent theme was that gardens were enclosed, ideally by walls, for security from human or animal intruders. Even within the garden there seem to have been an abundance of lighter barriers demarcating areas. The range of plants available, especially in northern Europe, was extremely limited by modern standards, and most had shorter flowering periods and smaller and less numerous flowers than their modern versions. Information from all the various types of sources, documentary, literary and artistic, increases fairly steadily over the period, which probably reflects an increase in ornamental gardening.

Climate history
The Middle Ages saw significant fluctuations in climate, which must have impacted gardening. The Roman Warm Period that ran from approximately 250 BC to AD 400 seems to have given conditions broadly similar to those in the year 2000. Then the volcanic winter of 536 brought a sharp cooling, apparently added to by further eruptions in the next 15 years, producing the Late Antique Little Ice Age.

The Medieval Warm Period, from about 950 to 1250 again restored average temperatures to 20th-century levels, before the beginning of the Little Ice Age, which outlasted the medieval period. When this began is uncertain, but the Great Famine of 1315–1317 was an extended period of poor weather.

History
Roman gardening reached a high level of sophistication, but little of the tradition of ornamental gardening probably survived the difficult times of Late Antiquity. Some Roman garden writing survived, and continued to be heavily relied on for a thousand years. Much of the documentation of medieval gardening includes lists of plants that often have a suspiciously Mediterranean flavour, even when coming from well north of the Alps.