knot-garden

The knot garden flourished in England between roughly 1500 and 1700, though its formal elements drew on medieval garden design and its patterns survived well into the 18th century in conservative households. The principle was simple in concept, laborious in execution: low-growing herbs — primarily box (Buxus sempervirens), lavender, rosemary, thyme, and hyssop — were planted in interlacing lines that, viewed from above or from a raised terrace, created the impression of an ornamental knot. The spaces within the knot could be filled with differently colored gravel, sand, or seasonal flowering plants; 'open' knots used these fillings to reveal the pattern, while 'closed' knots filled the spaces entirely with close-clipped herbs.

The word 'knot' in this context shares its etymology with the knots of rope and the knot of wood: Old English cnotta, from Proto-Germanic *knuttaz, meaning an intertwined fastening. The same root gives Dutch knot, German Knoten, and, through various channels, the mathematical knot and the nautical knot (originally a knot tied at intervals in a log-line to measure a ship's speed). The Elizabethan gardeners who designed knot gardens were thinking in the same visual register as the illuminators of the Book of Kells or the carvers of Viking ship prows — interlace as pattern, the continuous line that crosses itself without beginning or end.

The practical knowledge of how to design and maintain a knot garden was codified in a series of English gardening manuals beginning in the mid-16th century. Thomas Hill's A Most Briefe and Pleasaunt Treatyse (1563) — the first English gardening book — devoted considerable space to knot designs, offering readers patterns they could copy directly into their gardens. Gervase Markham's The English Husbandman (1613) showed more elaborate patterns suited to larger plots. These books circulated among the minor gentry and prosperous yeomanry, spreading a form of garden design that had previously been the province of great houses.

The knot garden fell from fashion as the landscape movement of the 18th century dismissed formal patterning as artificial and un-English. But it never entirely disappeared: English cottage gardens preserved elements of the knot's principle, and the 20th-century heritage garden movement restored numerous knot gardens at historic properties. Hampton Court Palace has a reconstructed knot garden; Barnsley House in Gloucestershire had one designed by Rosemary Verey in the 1970s that became enormously influential. The pattern that Elizabethans clipped from hyssop and rue now appears on tea towels, wallpapers, and garden center promotional materials — the knotwork aesthetic extracted from its horticultural context and turned decorative.