Water is a garden’s lifeblood. Gardening began with it, in the royal gardens of the Babylonian, Assyrian and Persian kings. It depends on it, as survivors of the overheated British summers of the 1990s know only too well. Nowadays, artificial systems of irrigation are the hidden secrets of gardens throughout the Mediterranean and are even to be detected in southern England. We all use water but are we equally good at gardening with it?

Italy’s historic gardens are certainly at the top of the water designers’ league. Their architects knew how to use cascades and fountains and their engineers really made them work. Water splashing in channels down hillsides is an Italian forte. I think of the descending cascades on the upper levels of the famous Villa Lante at Bagnaia or the bold descending stairway of water in the formal garden of the Villa Aldobrandini near Rome. The supreme water displays are those of the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, laid out for a Catholic cardinal who was seeking a retreat from the sultry summer climate of the Vatican. The villa expressed his witty love of themes from the classical past and offered scope for his consuming passion, boar hunting in the wild landscape beyond. The best of his waterworks and water machines have recently been restored to working order and if you arrive when the garden first opens each morning you can enjoy it in fine form before the coaches of tourists arrive later on day trips from Rome. I consider the garden to be the greatest contribution of any cardinal before or since to the world about him.

At the Villa Lante and the Villa d’Este the use of water is so self-confident that it is also playful. The Villa Lante was another cardinal’s second home and its guests were at risk to concealed jets of water that might soak them unawares. At the Villa d’Este the waterworks include some virtuoso toys, including a fountain that simulates the hoot of owls. Nowadays, literary critics call this sort of jocularity “ludic”. I think it has deep roots in Italy’s long tradition of classical gardening. Around AD100 Pliny the Younger describes in an elegant Latin letter how he likes to dine outdoors in his landscaped garden, where guests recline around a central expanse of water. On it the plates for dinner with Pliny were made to float amusingly. In 16th century Rome the great banking dynasts, the Chigi family, were notorious for ordering their silver plates to be thrown after dinner into the river that ran beside their grand Villa Farnesina. Guests did not realise that the servants had installed nets just below the water’s surface so that the family silver could be retrieved when the guests had left in stunned amazement.

Italians are the exuberant water kings but a few “ludic” fellow clergy caught the habit from them elsewhere. Near Salzburg in Austria water jokes on the Italian principle took the fancy of the city’s archbishop. He installed concealed water-jets near his outdoor dinner table so that he, too, could soak his unsuspecting guests. The fun has never spread north to Protestant Canterbury or Lambeth but the Salzburg jets are still teasing their many visitors. “Heiliges Wasser, Archbischofswasser,” I remember the guide chanting gleefully as he drenched his coachloads of visitors, many of them in lederhosen, when I first visited the site.

In Spain the water trick that I most admire is in the garden of the Generalife, beside the Alhambra Palace in Granada. Water races down two clay channels that serve as a sort of moving handrail on either side of a steep flight of historic steps. A pump has to propel them but they are a charming conceit, which ought to be copied more often. The steeper the steps, the faster and more fascinating will be the flow. They would look just as neat in the cloudier climate of Britain and in winter, of course, the pump would take a rest.

For water grandeur we look instead to France. French patrons are the lords of the grandiose fountain, culminating in the superb plumes of water at Versailles. In the Apollo Lake, the water spouts from four sculpted horses, representing the team that pulled the Sun god’s mythical chariot. On clear days it seems as if they are exhaling a mist of water while feathery fountains play spectacularly behind them, installed for the pleasure of the new Apollo, Louis XIV, the Sun King. Throughout the garden art triumphs boldly over nature to a degree that became the envy of lesser princelings throughout 18th-century Europe. If you ever want a fabulous fountain, get a French-speaking designer to set one up.

What, though, about the English garden, that self-styled wonder of the world? Our only historic waterscape that competes with France and Italy is the stupendous Cascade at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, now up and running again to its full capacity. Chatsworth, however, is a historic palace on a continental scale. Elsewhere British fountains are pathetic. If they have not broken down they never get it up anyway. What Frenchman would ever tolerate all the feeble water spouts in London, culminating in those diminutive jets at Marble Arch? Mayor Boris Johnson should prescribe doses of Viagra for the lot of them.

Outside London, British attempts at waterworks hold the world record for clogging up or breaking down. At Westbury Court in Gloucestershire a national appeal was needed to rescue the historic 17th century garden of canals and pavilions in the Dutch style. The place is back under restoration yet again and is now at risk to the superior water-power of floods from the nearby River Severn. In the Edwardian era the two great designers of formal water features were Edwin Lutyens and Harold Peto. Their designs all lacked stamina in a British climate. Peto’s long water canals at Buscot Park in Oxfordshire have been leaking all year, to the frustration of the overseeing National Trust. Until recently Lutyens’ ponds and rills in gardens such as Hestercombe in Somerset were empty, cracked vessels after less than a hundred years of life. British waterworks match the faulty ratings of postwar British-made “family” cars.

Should we blame the winter frost? Somehow I do not see us as a nation of water jokers and fountain lovers, even in mild winters. Our strong point is lake design. Sheets of still water in parkland are the great English contribution to landscape history. From Stourhead to the restored Thenford home of Lord Heseltine in Oxfordshire, man-made lakes curve and recede inimitably through a natural landscape of grass and shrubs. Are the English too contemplative and too lost in a dreamy idyll to force water to new and daring heights? Or do we prefer the natural style lake at ground level because we are less cursed with mosquitoes? Perhaps we still have enough of a green and pleasant landscape for us to excel at enhancing its image, not defying its natural gravity. The best water in an English garden is water that slightly improves on nature.