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Abstract Italian Renaissance architecture has fascinated travellers for centuries. By the twentieth century well-off, educated English and Americans were renting and buying villas, particularly around Florence, restoring them and designing gardens in what were believed to be historic examples of the ‘Italian garden style’. Research by garden historians has revealed, however, that Renaissance gardens were not formally designed but laid out according to utilitarian ideas, inherited practical knowledge of horticulture, and by using manuals based on Greek and Roman classical texts, agricultural treatises, and the new language of humanism. Despite the philosophical link between Nature and Art, agriculture remained one of the seven mechanical arts. Not until the mid-sixteenth century was a garden design commissioned and prepared for Duke Cosimo I at Villa Di Castello, where we see a radical shift in garden making with the development of an iconography conveying political propaganda. Garden making evolved from practical horticulture to an art form with its own grammar derived from architecture that codified the design principles and acknowledged the creative process. SUE EBURY is a biographer and former editor and publisher. She was a founding committee member of the Australian Garden History Society, its first honorary editor and inaugural Victorian State Chair. She is now the national patron of the society. This paper is the result of several summers spent examining Tuscan gardens on the ground.
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