Gardens have long been a symbol of great civilizations. Many religions envision paradise as a garden—in fact, the word “paradise” derives from an ancient Persian word for “walled garden.” Yet the origins of history’s most famous gardens are far from angelic.
The Aztecs harnessed the natural springs at Chapultepec to build one of the world’s first botanic gardens. Soldiers made the Sun King’s Versailles rise from a former swamp. Emperors of the Qing Dynasty diverted water from lakes and rivers to feed the fountains of Yuanmingyuan (The Garden of Perfect Brightness).
With their vast scale and technological advances, these gardens of empire bent nature—and their subjects—to the ruler’s will. The plants and people collected within them represented the lands they controlled, placing status, wealth and power at the root of these man-made Edens.
The Aztecs: Chapultepec
“The whole idea of a botanic garden, one that is representative of all the species an emperor could command from his empire, hit the ground in Europe in Italy, but may have been inspired by the New World,” says Susan Toby Evans, author of Aztec royal pleasure parks: Conspicuous consumption and elite status rivalry.
Spanish conquistadors wrote home with dazzling accounts of the extensive gardens of the Aztec. Cortés described Huaxtepec, a garden seven miles wide with hundreds of species of herbs, shrubs and trees from across Moctezuma’s empire, as the “largest, most beautiful and freshest” gardens he’d ever seen.
The Aztecs were advanced botanists with a complex plant classification system. They knew of over 3,000 medicinal plants, including ones to ease childbirth and menstruation pain. Hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms called Teonanácatl (“divine mushrooms” or “flesh of the gods”) were used to communicate with the divine and reserved for use by nobility and priests.
Plants were an essential part of the tribute system underpinning the Aztec Triple Alliance, in which the city-states of Tenochtitlán, Texcoco and Tlacopan ruled together in exchange for contributions from the city-states they conquered. Fragrant plants like Tlilxochitl (vanilla bean orchid) and yolloxochitl (Mexican magnolia) were luxuries and indicators of rank.
Rare plants were delivered to imperial gardens “wrapped in fine cloth,” says Evans, and accompanied by dedicated gardeners to care for them. Plants from warmer parts of the empire that failed to thrive at the high altitudes of the emperor’s pleasure palaces were carved in stone alongside living plants to form what Evans calls “a green encyclopedia of the empire’s wealth and resources.”
The location of a garden was just as important as what it contained. Chapultepec offered sweeping views of the capital of Tenochtitlan and was an easy commute from the city by canoe. The springs at Chapultepec supplied water to the capital, and the grand five-mile long aqueduct that linked them was a showcase for the empire’s technological achievements. In making his personal paradise the source of life-bringing water to his people, Moctezuma “demonstrated he could appropriate places of beauty and spiritual significance and command massive resources to achieve mastery over those landscapes,” says Evans.
When the Spanish arrived, one of Moctezuma’s last acts as emperor was to have his image carved into the hillside of Chapultepec, setting his memory in stone alongside the flowers he loved.
The Bourbons: Versailles
No ruler was more obsessed with divine garden imagery than Louis XIV, aka “The Sun King.” He expressed this obsession through his stunning gardens at Versailles. “Apollonian imagery is everywhere at Versailles,” says Ian H. Thompson, author of The Sun King’s Garden.
Identifying with the Greek Sun God allowed Louis to skirt Christian imagery. “Although Louis was often styled the ‘Most Christian King,’ he didn’t want to be told what to do by churchmen,” says Thompson. Louis was hell-bent on building a French empire and garden meant to give Rome—then the dominant Christian power in Europe—a run for its money.
Portrait of Louis XIV, King of France (Louis the Great, Sun King) at the age of 63.
It took a lot of money to transform a former swamp into the most famous garden in the world. Designer André Le Nôtre (1613–1700) harnessed nature to meet the king’s demands. Versailles employed 7,000 gardeners and had over 2,400 fountains. Water consumption accounted for a third of the garden’s budget. The fountains required so much hydropower that they could not all be turned on at once, so staff were stationed throughout the grounds to turn individual fountains on as King Louis XIV passed by.
When the Machine de Marly, an invention that drew water uphill from the Seine to Versailles, failed to pump enough water, the king took a page from the Aztecs and Romans and commissioned Vauban’s Aqueduct. The soldiers building it were called to war and it was never completed.
Louis’s thirst for water, like his thirst for territorial expansion, had a human cost, and the military bore the brunt of it. “The army did much of the construction work. When they weren’t fighting, they were digging,” says Thompson. Many of the Swiss Guards who excavated The Pond of the Swiss died of malaria. Court chronicler Madame de Sévigné reported: “every night wagons full of the dead are carried out.”
During the day, at least, the gardens were full of life. The Sun King’s fondness for flowering citrus trees was legendary; there were 3,000 orange trees in the Orangerie alone. To maintain constant blossoms, gardeners sourced plants from all over the globe that bloomed at different times and developed new forcing techniques so the king saw—and smelled—his favorite flowers at will.
“The gardens were a statement of France’s glory, and Louis loved showing them off,” says Thompson. The king wrote several editions of his "Manière de Montrer les Jardins,” a manual on how to best view the gardens. In addition to prized flora like tulips, narcissi and irises, the garden was also home to prized fauna like lions, rhinos, and elephants. “The design of the Menagerie de Versailles was a precursor of the Panopticon prison, where a single warder can watch dozens of inmates,” says Thompson.
While previous French kings ruled from Paris, Louis chose to build his palace and gardens on the remote site of his father’s former hunting lodge. “It was a place of safety he’d fled to during the Frondes, a period of rebellion against the crown," Thompson says. "By moving his court there in 1682, he could make sure they weren’t plotting against him." Perhaps the French court had more in common with the animals in Versailles’ gilded zoo than they cared to admit.
Read the rest on The History Channel’s History.com.