Medieval Inspiration

 

 

I love getting my gardening ideas from all sorts of weird and wonderful places. Take for example this woodcut I stumbled across recently. It comes from a book entitled Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus written in German, despite the Latin title, which translates as Book on the art of distillation out of simple ingredients. It was written in the year 1500 by a chap with the rather fancy name of Hieronymus Brunschwig.

What really caught my eye in this woodcut, apart from the wonderfully dynamic garden-scape, is the gate. If you look closely, you can see it is actually a living entrance, two trees grafted together into an intricately patterned arch. I just love it!

The interesting thing is that this example of living art is from so very early. The modern artist, Richard Reames, who makes remarkably similar living sculpture today, explains that the earliest example of this art-form he could find was from 1516.

The technique used is so simple and yet so effective. At a fundamental level, it utilises the same basic grafting method employed in bridge grafting to save trees with girdled bark. I just recently explained this process in a previous post. I now plan to grow a little artwork of my own by grafting an apple arch in my garden. Thank you Herr Brunschwig for offering such inspiration across the ages.