Some celebrated verse of Christine de Pisan, who wrote "The Life of Charles V," thus describes the cloister at Poissy.
"Du cloistre grand large et especieux Que est carré, et, afin qu'il soit mieulx A un prael, ou milieu, gracieux Vert sans grappin Ou a planté en my un très hault pin."
It was at this period, that of Saint Louis and the apotheosis of Gothic architecture, that France was at the head of European civilization, therefore in no way can her preëminence in garden-making be questioned.
The gardens of the Gothic era seldom surpassed the _enclos_ with a rivulet passing through it, a spring, a pine tree giving a welcome shade, some simple flowers and a _verger_ of fruit trees.
The neighbours of France were often warring among themselves but the Grand Seigneur here was settling down to beautifying his surroundings and framing his chateaux, manors and country-seats in dignified and most appealing pictures. Grass-plots appeared in dooryards, flowers climbed up along castle walls and shrubs and trees came to play a genuinely esthetic rôle in the life of the times.
An illustrious stranger, banished from Italy, one Brunetto Latini, the master of Dante, who had sought a refuge in France, wrote his views on the matter, which in substance were as above.
About this time originated the progenitors of the _gloriettes_, which became so greatly the vogue in the eighteenth century. Practically the _gloriette_, a word in common use in northern France and in Flanders, was a _logette de plaisance_. The Spaniards, too, in their _glorietta_, a pavilion in a garden, had practically the same signification of the word.
In the fourteenth century French garden the _gloriette_ was a sort of arbour, or trellis-like summer-house, garnished with vines and often perched upon a natural or artificial eminence. Other fast developing details of the French garden were tree-bordered alleys and the planting of more or less regularly set-out beds of flowering plants.
Vine trellises and vine-clad pavilions and groves were a speedy development of these details, and played parts of considerable importance in gardening under the French Renaissance.
In this same connection there is a very precise record in an account of the gardens of the Louvre under Charles V concerning the contribution of one, Jean Baril, maker of Arlors, to this form of the landscape architect's art.