Garden of Love 2011 Forever Stamps — Love and Celebration, Pane Issue

Issue facts

Issue Date: May 23, 2011
City: Crestwood, KY
Printed by: Avery Dennison
Printing Method: Photogravure
Color: Multicolored

Four thousand years of gardens

Gardens began as private ground for the privileged, became settings for royal courts, and ended up as places anyone can go to sit quietly.

Some of the earliest on record appear in Egyptian tomb paintings from the 1500s B.C. — lotus ponds framed by symmetrical rows of acacia and palm. The finest Egyptian gardens added sheltering trees and ornamental pools stocked with fish and birds. Around 800 B.C., Persian gardens were organized around water, using its coolness against Iran's hot, dry climate.

How the idea changed

Roman gardens offered a retreat from the noise of the city. Through the Byzantine Era (330–1453 A.D.) the form was reshaped by Christianity's adoption as the official religion. Medieval gardens were read as the meeting of earth and the divine, while Renaissance designs led visitors through a narrative, using statuary and water features to reference mythology.

The 1700s turned toward natural landscape and prized wildness. The 1800s brought the garden back down in scale and made it a place for botanical curiosities.

Now

Some contemporary gardens borrow from several of these periods at once; most take their cues from modern architecture and form following function. Old or new, the function has been constant for four millennia — somewhere to step out of the day and look at something living.

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