Secrets of the Renaissance Garden

The Renaissance garden works its magic by combining greenery and masonry, statues and fountains.  Italian garden designers found new ways to align art and nature, creating places where the civilized and the wild could coexist. One inspiration was a book published in 1499 and owned by Special Collections. Called The Dream of Poliphilo, this book contains nearly 200 illustrations, which generated new ideas about what gardens could be.