Arcadia Discussion Zone

I go with Rain's Barberries....that's the one....well spotted.

Richard. .... your bush is a Spindle tree btw, we have lots out here.

Wombat's obviously going to have to go back to fetch us a sprig to be sure.

Wombat's obviously going to have to go back to fetch us a sprig to be sure.

Wombat wouldn't be able to bring it back to Australia. We have some of the strictest laws in world pertaining to the import of plant, etc... material.

Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service.

http://www.daffa.gov.au/aqis

You could make Jam with the fruit Wombat and you could bring that back.

Barberries....that's the one....well spotted.

Full circle, but I can go with that, Sheila, especially since... "Among the Italians, the Barberry bears the name of Holy Thorn, because it is thought to have formed part of the crown of thorns made for our Saviour".

http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/b/barcom12.html

Very appropriate in the RLC context, eh?

Regards to all

Wombat.

Greek keys

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Index --- style --- turns --- designs --- compare keys --- corners --- 2 dimensional --- modern --- triangular --- copying


A Greek key is a decorative border. There are a surprising number of different versions. This website explains how the keys are different from each other and allows you to compare keys against each other.

•style - introduction to making Greek keys
•turns - making the keys more complicated
•designs - a list of all designs on this website
•compare keys - produce different patterns in different sizes
•corners - including various ways to colour Greek keys
•2 dimensional patterns
•modern designs - including tilted and progressive Greek keys
•triangular designs - including 2 dimensional patterns and borders
•copying patterns from this site
The Greek key pattern is called that because the square pieces sticking out in the pattern look rather like a key. The pattern is also known as a meander or a Greek fret.

Meander means twisting and turning, It is named after the River Meander, now called Büyük Menderes River, in South Western Turkey. This river is mentioned in the Iliad, by Homer. Part of the river is shown on the right. As you can see, it is a very twisting river! The U shapes are oxbow lakes, made when the river changes course. So a meander pattern is a single path which twists back on itself. This is a good description of the Greek key.

Fretwork is a design cut out with a fretsaw. A Greek key is geometric and simple and you could imagine that it has been cut out, which explains its other name, Greek fret. Also it is one colour against a neutral background, so it is easy to carve or cut.


The Greek Key topology is a kind of structure of a protein. The strands of the protein is like a single line, but connected together like a Greek Key. There are some examples on the left.


The Greek key pattern has been used throughout history and in many places. Since it is a simple geometric pattern, it isn't surprising that so many people have used it. The ancient Greeks certainly used it, as carvings on their temples, and on their pottery. You can see a simple Greek key on the head band of the famous Charioteer statue found at Delphi. The Romans liked the pattern as well, using it in their mosaics. However, it's used elsewhere in the world. The Dongson (or Dong Son) culture, which was centered around the Tonkin gulf in present-day Vietnam used Greek key ornamentation. It has also been used by Hopi people in North America.
Various claims have been made for what a Greek key means. There may be a connection with the labyrinth where Theseus fought the Minotaur. A Greek bowl in the British museum shows Theseus dragging the Minotaur from the labyrinth, which is indicated by a Greek key frieze. You can make a Cretan or classical maze using a Greek key (see left), and many mazes have Greek keys embedded in a design, especially Roman mazes.

Other suggested meanings are stylised waves, snakes, symbolizing the bonds of love, friendship and devotion, eternal life, the four cardinal points, the meander of life, creative energy, the four seasons, etc. Take your pick! I prefer the waves. There are curved forms of Greek keys which look very like seawaves. The one below is on the shield of Philip, father of Alexander the Great. The shield also has a more conventional Greek key pattern. This website only describes the square forms.

The Plan of Saint Gall is a famous medieval architectural drawing of a monastic compound dating from the early 9th century. It is preserved in the Stiftsbibliothek Sankt Gallen, Ms 1092.
It is the only surviving major architectural drawing from the roughly 700-year period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the 13th century. It is considered a national treasure of Switzerland and remains an object of intense interest among modern scholars, architects, artists and draftsmen for its uniqueness, its beauty, and the insights it provides into medieval culture.

The Plan depicts an entire Benedictine monastic compound including churches, houses, stables, kitchens, workshops, brewery, infirmary, and even a special house for bloodletting. The Plan was never actually built, and was so named because it was kept at the famous medieval monastery library of the Abbey of St. Gall, where it remains to this day. It was drawn in a scriptorium in Reichenau in the third decade of the 9th century, dedicated to Abbot Gozbert (816-836) of Saint Gall.

The Plan was created from five parchments sewn together measuring 45 inches by 31 inches (113 cm by 78 cm) and drawn in red ink lines for the buildings, and brown ink for lettered inscriptions. It is drawn to an "unusual" scale of 1:192 (although as explained in detail in the "The Plan of St. Gall in brief" by Lorna Price, this is 1/16" to the foot, which would not be so surprising as necessary to place the overall plan onto this size piece of parchment). The reverse of the Plan was inscribed in the 12th century, after it had been folded into book form, with the Life of Saint Martin by Sulpicius Severus. About 350 partly rhyming appendices in the handwritings of two different scribes describe the functions of the buildings. The dedication to Abbot Gozbert is written in the margin.

Because the plan does not correspond to any place that was actually built, just about every aspect of the Plan is disputed by modern scholars. Debates continue on things such as which system of measurement was used; whether the scale is a single scale for the entire plan or varied for different elements; if the plan is a copy from a lost prototype or the original; if it is reflective of a single individual's ideas, or those of monastic council.

The St Gall plan is the only extant measurable medieval plan, and modules of one and a quarter feet were used here, but the plan is in addition resplendent with number symbolism. There is much discussion about the danger of reading too much into the meaning of numbers, but it was a subject which fascinated the medieval mind, and both the St Gall plan and the monastic buildings of Cluny indisputably show evidence of playing with numbers. According to the seventh century Spanish encyclopaedist, St Isidore, a 'perfect' number equals the sum of all its sub-multiples. There were only three perfect numbers, 6, 28 and 496, together with 1 which had its own perfection. To extend Isidore's observations further it can be seen that the perfect numbers 1, 6 and 28 (=35), and all their sub-multiples 2, 3, 4, 7, and 14, are all contained within the number 84, the same number of feet of cord used to lay out the 21-foot square. This would indeed seem to make a 'perfect' garden cord! (p.91)

Parts of the human body are as good a unit of measurement for gardeners today as they were in the Middle Ages - a foot, a step (of about two and a half feet) and the same in forward reach. A hand-span of eight or nine inches gave a suitable distance for planting leeks, as it still does, and a hand or palm width still measures our horses ... For soft and long and curved measures, the arm span of about six feet or a fathom, was useful for measuring the girth of a tree, or several linked arm spans for measuring bean stacks in a yard. Even in 1986 the whole human form was the basis for designing the shape of a tunnel arbour at Queen Eleanor's Garden, Winchester. (p.89)

In England the foot was standardised to its present length in the reign of Henry I (1100-1135) and the measured acre became 66 by 660 feet in the reign of Edward I (1272-1307) based on an original principle of thirty-three turns of the plough, forwards and back again. The standard perch of 16.5 square feet was a subdivision of the measured acre. These measures were no doubt crude in practice but were important for calculating the seed required, the yield to be accounted, labour to be paid, and boundaries to be measured. (p.89)

With so many perches in use ranging between 16, 16.5, 18, 20 and 22 feet, and the 'church' pole of 21 feet, consistency had to be maintained at a local level. There is a European tradition that in each parish the feet of the first sixteen men leaving the church were measured. (p.89)

The Roman measuring rod of ten feet together with an associated cord, was frequently used ... and ... rather than being divided into feet it could be halved, quartered and then divided into eighths, relating to the Roman pace, step, and pedipassus of 5 feet, 2.5 feet and 1.25 feet respectively. It was on this basis that the idealised plan of St Gall was imaginatively deciphered ... The measure of 2.5 feet was used by John Rea as late as the seventeenth century for laying out parterres, and the Oxford Botanic Garden was based on a ten-foot scale as late as the seventeenth century. (p. 90)

Plots needed reliable right-angled sides particularly for vegetables grown in rows, and although the average peasant might have a rough go, the sophisticated garden architect who was laying out regular square beds would have to measure more accurately. Indeed geometry, literally 'measurement of the earth', sprang from the necessity continually to re-lay the agricultural plots of the ancient Egyptian Nile flood plain. Out of this came Euclid's three:four:five ratio for constructing a right-angle which was carried out in practice by cords knotted in those proportions, and the Egyptian word for surveyor meant 'knotted rope bearer'. Only two records of knotted cord length are known, one being quoted by Richard Benyse in 1520 who referred to a cord of 82.5 feet, waxed against shrinkage. This measurement is not so surprising since it is five perches, or a furlong, and equalling an eighth of an acre length, and even today corporation allotments are still allocated in areas of perches. The second cord was given to the gardener at Winchester College in 1437 and was a very expensive one amongst other cheap examples. It was fourteen fathoms long, and equivalent to a labourer's wages for two weeks. Why fourteen fathoms, or eighty-four feet? Out of this length a three:four:five triangle could be made, twenty-one, twenty-eight and thirty-five feet. A European medieval horticultural unit of twenty-one feet coould also be laid out by the triangular method using such an eighty-four-foot cord ... (pp.90-91)

This re-created medieval garden Commanderie des Templiers de Coulommiers has a great advantage over most of its competitors: an authentic architectural setting. The buildings were part of a monastery belonging to the Knights Templars. The garden design, inspired by paintings of medieval gardens, was by Joel Chatain, a landscape architecture graduate from Versailles, and the work was carried out by young volunteers. Extensive use is made of wattle fencing.