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CHAPTER ONE |
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THE GARDENS OF CROESUS |
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The vast iron wheel of taste that had spun, for much of the eighteenth century, with suchspeed and precision that it seemed scarcely to move, began to slow down toward the century's end. As it began to swing on its axis like the wheel of a gyroscope, it began to throw out small showers of tiny sparks; a cluster of Picturesque gardens, a sudden brilliant flower garden, an 'American' garden, a few rose arbours or a heart-shape bed filled with a mixture of simple annuals. As the swings became wider and wilder in the 1830's, the showers of sparks became more and more showy, and more and more unpredictable. There were sudden bursts of Italianate, or French, or Chinese, or Egyptian gardens, or vast and brilliant parterres filled with exotic plants from the swamps of South America, or immense rockeries supposed to model the Alps, with glaciers of crushed marble and spar, populated with real alpine plants and model chamois goats in tin. There were sudden showers of back-to-nature gardens, of gardens filled only for a season with palms and Indian lilies, or of gardens so refined and chilly and Classical that they were inhabited only by painted iron casts of Roman antiques. As the glare from the slowing wheel's streams of sparks increased, it was possible to see more than the gardens of the rich and the stylish: there were gardens everywhere, in dark industrial cities where artisans cherished the latest variety of rose or auricula, in front of cramped terraced houses, in parks and pleasure grounds and tea gardens, even plots of gaudy bedding plants amongst fresh grey tombstones. Gardens invaded windowsills, drawing-rooms, dirty closes and courtyards of ancient cities, or spawned ideas of ideal 'garden cities' with which to replace them. Gardens became places for the rich to be even more extravagant,places to be given to the turbulent masses to placate them, or places to store the incredible flood of plants that poured into Britain from all over the world. Some gardens became places of the grossest vulgarity; others, fewer, became places of great beauty. It seemed, throughout much of Victorian Britain that everyone gardened, from great aristocrats and magnates, vying with each other to produce ever vaster conservatories, terraces, and parterres, all planted with ever rarer flowers and shrubs, to obscure spinsters, dying curates, artisans, labourers, tradesmen. More surprisingly, almost everyone seems to have written about gardening. The dying curates wrote brave best-sellers completed by an anonymous 'fair hand', the spinsters (from the marvellous muscular Miss Hope of Edinburgh to the egregious 'Rosa' of the 'Cottage Gardeners' pages), charted the changing role of women from delicate flower to muddy planter and designer; artisans and labourers joined florists' societies and sent letters and papers to the increasing numbers of gardening magazines. Garden books poured from the presses; books for gardening children, for bored housewives, for new-minted members of the middle class in crisp 'third rate' houses in Fulham or Manchester or Goole,books by plant collectors, travellers, gardeners to the peerage (so many of these seemed to either write or edit that they must scarcely have had time to manage their employers' no doubt very weedy gardens). Reverends wrote comfortable garden books in the Home Counties, and Ministers wrote them in the dampest and remotest parts of Scotland. Landowners' younger brothers wrote penny pamphlets for the destitute cottagers of their brother's estates, half-mad men wrote impossible books for the impossible urban poor. Though most of this book is about the more modest classes of garden and gardener, and almost everybody with but the tiniest scrap of ground had at least a few flower beds and a rockery scattered with seashells and broken porcelain, the very rich naturally produced the grandest and often most extraordinary examples of each garden element. To get a flavour of the period, it is simplest to look at the great prodigies of Victorian gardening first. Of these vast gardens, like Chatsworth, Trentham, Wimbledon,
Cragside, Drummond Castle and Castle Kennedy, there are an
enormous number of examples. It sometimes seems as if every great
house spent much of the age surrounded by mud and scaffolding. In
some of them, the grandee owners invoked memories of their
families, or at least their house's past grandeurs, either by
supposedly copying rediscovered designs for the garden in
question, or re-creating gardens based on their own, or their
gardener's reading of early English garden books. Others, and
especially the new magnates of America, who had provided
themselves with new houses in Gothic or French style, chose to
see themselves as Renaissance or seventeenth century princelings,
and adopted only moderately Victorianised schemes culled from
European sources. Numbers of magnates, whether owning old or new
money, chose the fashionable style of the early-Victorian period,
which they called, without an enormous amount of justification,
'Italianate', and surrounded their mansions with immense
terraces, astonishing fountains, box-edged parterres, statuary,
orange trees, and gravel walks that stretched to the horizon.
Greedy magnates wanted, and got, everything. Some gardens had
Alpine rockeries, Elizabethan knot gardens, models of the Great
Wall of China, miniature Scottish glens, two acre conservatories,
American gardens, grottoes and Swiss cottages all in such
abundance that any visitor who visited each in turn must have
been quite bewildered. The sheer scale of some of them was quite
remarkable; one of the most astonishing of these was probably
Trentham Hall; this was an early seventeenth century site,
renowned for its dullness, owned by the Marquis of Stafford. Work
on a vast new scheme began as part of the development of the
house undertaken by Sir Charles Barry from 1833. This was
prodigious. There were proposals for an immense stone and glass
conservatory that was to equal the house in size, and to form an
entire wing. The gardens, whose initial plans were also by Barry,
began to take shape almost as soon as the house was begun. An
account from a few decades after their partial completion
describes the terraces created from almost flat ground thus: 'the
first level is about two hundred feet square, and is divided from
the second by a stone balustrade. In the centre is a circular
plot with a fountain and pond. A flight of circular steps leads
to the second level, an oblong enclosure seven hundred feet long
by five hundred feet in breadth, divided by a broad gravel path,
bordered with with trees in tubs, and on each side are ponds. At
the far end, overlooking the lake, is a handsome stone terrace
four hundred and sixty feet long, with a statue of Perseus, and a
circular stone landing'. ================================================================================================= If you have
enjoyed reading thus far, the whole book, plus an appendix on Victorian
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