|
|
|
Nostalgia for some sort of golden past was one of the strands (and an important one), in the destruction of the Georgian mode of gardening in favour of the blazing obsession for bedding. The old landscape gardens, and their rolling lawns, vanished beneath terraces and flights of steps, beneath gaudy tadpoles and butterflies, 'Old English' parterres or ribbon beds so brilliant that all eyes were quite dazzled. Even older gardens still, of the sort that had bred early Victorian nostalgia, had not escaped the madness. No gardens of the seventeenth or the early eighteenth century remained at all intact; most of them had had their ancient and overgrown yews re-cut into fancy topiary, or their box edged parterres replanted with calceolarias and geraniums, even if they were not utterly revamped and so destroyed. Ancient avenues were replanted with monkey-puzzles, New Zealand Flame Tree, Rhododendron rex, and Wellingtonia. Nevertheless, though the nostalgia of the 1820's and 1830's went on, ironically, to produce gardens that were totally Victorian in both look and planting, and bore only the most superficial resemblance to the longed-for gardens of the past, there was a further level of irony to be had yet. Part of the original vein of nostalgia of the early nineteenth century, retained its purity over the succeeding decades, unaffected by whatever extraordinary glories were created in gardens of the Victorian period,and eventually became so powerful that it finally almost overthrew the style of gardening that it had itself once created, but forty years before. Even by 1841 a writer on the subject of a 'Garden of a Country Residence' described how 'We now sallied into the Garden, and I own I was disappointed. I expected a French or Italian taste, or perhaps both, engrafted upon the modern English; trellises, balustrades, busts, hothouses, conservatories. Except the last (of no great dimensions), there were none of these. There was an abundance of natural flowers, and some beautiful exotics; but these were, I thought, too much mingled with beds of herbs for culinary purposes, of which flowers formed the borders. This produced a style nearer the preceding, than the present century...' The visitor queried the old-fashioned-ness of the garden, with its outmoded herbs and mixed borders, but the owner replied 'I would rather have the smell of tedded grass, or kine, and that little Alderney close even to my drawing-room windows... ...than all the finery of lawns and Orange trees' The following year, the same pure if subterranean current of nostalgia was finding further expression (in spite of Paxton's continuing advocacy of half-hardy bedding), when an anonymous woman writer complained that 'If I am to have a system at all, give me the good old system of terraces and angled walks, and clipt yew hedges, against whose dark and rich verdure the bright old fashioned flowers glittered in the sun. I love the topiary art, with its trimness and primness, and its open avowal of its artificial character...' She disliked the contemporary 'natural or English style. . [with its] scores of unmeaning flower beds, disfiguring the lawns in the shape of kidneys, and tadpoles, and sausages, and leeches, and commas...' Her own garden, which she describes at some length, while making use of much of the new flora, has the steps to the kitchen garden flanked by old fashioned flowers like hollyhocks (though she had as well as some of the new dahlias), china asters, nasturians [her spelling], and African marigolds. Elsewhere, she had a bowling green with clipped hedges, a maze with a central mount and summerhouse, a sundial of flowers (soon to become a popular Victorian feature), surrounded by topiary peacocks and lions, covered walks, embrasures with potted carnations and pinks, a miniature canal, and much more. Though the final result may have looked rather early-Victorian, her passion was for the entire range of seventeenth century garden elements. Naturally, like any good and greedy gardener, she couldn't resist plenty of modern elements too, like the part where 'Rock plants of every description freely grow in the crevices of the rustic battlement which flanks the path on either side; the irregularity of the structure increases as you descend, till, on arriving on the lawn below, large rude masses [of stone] lie scattered on the turf, and along the foundations of the western terrace...' Shirley Hibberd mined this idea, popularising it (as his own) a few years later. On the other hand, the terrace she called 'the nosegay of the garden', and while it was planted up with plenty of fashionable and modern flowers, it gave much of its space to the old fashioned flora, so the 'the sweetbrier and the wallflower and the clove and the stock gilliflower are not too common to be neglected...' In 1849, nostalgia for the old sorts of gardening, as well as some of the faults of the new were becoming apparent. As one writer put it ' The mode of supplying beds of flowers now, is very different to what it was twenty years ago. The mixed flower garden where perennials..., biennials, annuals...,roses, bulbs and so forth, were all grown together is but seldom seen now, at least, to any extent. Yet the old method had its advantages' One of these was that the ground was not bare for long periods, as it was by 1849. However, the writer does not go on to suggest a return to the old sort of flower garden, but suggests even more bedding, this time in winter (the winter bedding was to consist of ivies in pots, small conifers and various small evergreens - head-gardeners must have been delighted). At about the same time, Edward Jesse published a self-consciously 'artistic' and wildly successful book called 'Favourite Haunts and Rural Studies' (1847), in which he describes numbers of gardens, some modern, like Dropmore, but many more suitably 'Gothic' and romantic, or at least formal and rational, but by no means like the sort of thing overtly fashionable when the book appeared. Especially admired was an ancient house called 'Parlem Park' (the original spelling was 'Parlaunt'), near Colnbrook, and now long vanished. With ancient arcades, 'The house appears to have been preserved with the greatest care, and nothing could be neater than its appearance. Then there was that sort of old-fashioned garden in front which I delight in ... [with] large tufts of lavender and box - the honest old English roses, now nearly exploded - the sundial, and other characteristics of a garden of bygone times'. It was only to be another thirty or forty years before the 'bygone' gardens were being recreated with enthusiasm all over the country. Of Hall Barn, with then still a wonderful formal garden of the early eighteenth century (now in fragments), he wrote '...the gardens retain much of their original character, consisting of broad terrace of gravel and grass, sheltered by lofty screens of laurel and yew. A small lake, in the formal shape of the time, is seen at the bottom, with a banqueting house at the upper end of it, surrounded by an extensive lawn, and adorned with temples and summer houses... The design is pleasing and elegant, formed after the taste of those times which admitted a more regular and systematic plan than would be approved of in the present day.' Naturally, he admired English cottages, where the rosy-cheeked cottager gardened with perfect taste and astonishing industry, and so 'enjoys one of the most innocent delights of human life. There the sweet briar and honeysuckle mingle together in pleasing confusion...', far away, as they seem, from the destitution and the beer-shops of the cottage life described by Rosa a year of two later. However patently ridiculous and untrue this 'cottage fantasy' must have been for a large percentage of the rural poor, the sentiment expressed by Jesse was remarkably powerful (it still is, for people whose lives are lived in cities), with cottage gardens filled with the perfume of lavender, myrtle and roses, doves cluttering the house roof, and wasps buzzing amongst the gnarled but laden fruit trees. It became increasingly powerful throughout the century, as more and more of the population, and therefore the book and magazine readers, became exclusively urban. Associated with the delights of humble country life, were humble garden flowers, all so different from the over-bred and over-fashionable plants being planted out each summer for the few warm months. In the late 1840's, cottager's gardens were supposed to be full of the old garden flora; things like Adonis, aubretias, double ladies smock (Cardamine pratensis 'flore pleno'), hepaticas, double primulas, columbines, campanulas and double sweet williams. It's not clear if they actually did, though there may perhaps have been, to some extent, 'class floras' as there are today. From the lists of cottagers garden plants published from the 1850's onwards, it seems very much more likely that the vision of 'cottage garden flowers' was merely a projection of middle and upper class hopes, making them feel less alarmed for the future. The lists of actual flowers suggest that, for cottagers with enough time and money to grow flowers, many were quite as keen as the magnate to get hold of the very latest thing. Cottagers really did grow things like Gentiana septemfida and Anemone japonica, within a couple of seasons of their first introduction, and both were plants that remained just as popular in gardens of the wealthy. There were sharper looks at cottage life; 'The Kitchen Garden' (written in 1855 by E S Delaware) was one of a series of small volumes called 'Books for the Country'. They were published in in waxed linen covers, no doubt to suit real-life grubby cottage conditions, and though this one opens with a charming vignette of rakes and spades leaning against a fashionable sundial, it has a more realistic frontispiece showing two very depressed gardeners amongst the cabbages. Of the herbs and herb gardens (just about to become fashionable in middle class gardens, as part of nostalgic interest in 'huswifry', pot-pourri and such like), he writes of tansy: '... Tansy-pudding retains its place in old cookery-books. Few persons will regret its remaining therein instead of appearing in proper person on the table, if the dish partakes strongly of the peculiar and powerful odour of the plant. It may be of more value as a vermifuge than as a dainty.' Even such modest insight didn't last; too much was at stake. Shirley Hibberd, shrewd enough when he wanted, sensed that sentiment suited the spirit of the age, and of present times he wrote 'Gorgeous as is the promenade style, with its 'chain patterns' and 'panels' in colour, its terrace walks, sculptural embellishments and artistic devices, the brightest and most dazzling of flower mosaics must 'pale its ineffectual fires' when put in contrast with the arbours and avenues, the grand old trees, and the full richness of a well-kept ancient garden, where the old medicinal herbs load the air with odours, and in the fiercest heats of summer a cool shade is within easy reach...' Writing for a female audience, he wrote of the housewives in his version of Merrie England 'see how they gloried in their sweet-smelling dainties... you will almost smell the cowslip wine... and the bitter draughts that over-dressed dandies drank at the early luncheon, and the many sweet confections and pomades that good wives invented without number to enhance their own and their daughters' charms; for then the wife was head gardener...', and grew laced pinks [Hibberd is being anachronistic here, for laced pinks had only been grown since the last few years of the 18th century, by which time few ladies had much to do with the herb garden], picotees and carnations. By 1862, this nostalgia was no longer underground, but in full light, and flowing fast. One writer declaimed '....Where be my primroses, my Narcissuses, my Daffodils, my Paeonies, my Saxifrages, my Hyacinths, my Roses, my Irises, my pinks, my Picotees? Where be my storied plants (I mean my plants with a story attached to them) to make the way pleasant to my guests as we saunter the borders)... Where be all these gone? - sacrificed to the exigencies of ribbon beds... What a charming bond of union between a whole circle of neighbours to communicate to each other their new acquisitions. How different now!...What good to my neighbour a cartload of my thousand bedding out plants - he had another thousand just the same. ' By this date too, fond fantasies of the past were beginning to interest not only gardeners; painters began to play with fond ideas of eighteenth century gardens, inhabited by eighteenth century figures indulging in sulks, courtship, and so on. None of it was particularly authentic, nor even of particularly high quality. Although vast attention was paid to arms and armour, clothes, furnishings and so on, the inhabitants' features are always in the currently fashionable Victorian mode, and many of the plants shown in the borders were still in China or Brazil in the eighteenth century. Architects, too,were looking at old things with increasingly misty eyes. Architecture (and interior decoration), had been marching hand in hand with garden design for a century or more already, and had even run more or less in parallel during the wildest flights of the bedding craze. Even by 1820, with the discovery that Classical Greek and Roman buildings had been brilliantly coloured, colour had become deeply respected, and the slightly later discovery that the greyest and purest of Gothic buildings had also once been painted all over, only confirmed the enthusiasm. Architects, set free from the chasteness of monochrome, began to colour their buildings (usually using different building materials rather than mere paint). All this was comparable to the colourful cut-out beds on the lawn. Ruskin and others at first admired big simple masses of colour; circles, squares and so on, just as circular beds of flowers were thought the most elegant. By 1850, an increasing taste for complexity in planning design and decoration, especially of flat surfaces, mirrored the growth of ribbon bedding, and the new complexities of bed planting. By the 1860's, the most advanced of architects, and the most reactionary of gardeners had developed a distaste for fanciful and elaborate polychromy, and were looking for more restrained images. Influential books of this period included Kerr's 'The English Gentleman's House' of 1864 and C. L. Eastlake's 'Hints on Household Furniture' of 1868. This last marked the move away from heavily Gothic or Graeco-Roman furniture (and therefore the parterre outside the Gothic or Grecian windows of the drawing room), and a move towards simple and undecorated cottage things, true to their materials, and often derived from 17th and 18th century domestic English buildings and their interiors. Architects like Philip Webb began to find new interest in the charming but rather naive brick versions of 'classical' architecture of the same centuries, and suddenly elegant and quite expensive versions of vernacular houses and furnishings began, at least for the prosperous and fashionable, to appear, and were labelled 'Queen Anne'. But the undoubted charms of 'Queen Anne' houses were dulled if they were just set amongst unromantic carpet bedding, or Jacobethan parterres in scarlet, yellow and sky blue. The architects, realising that they needed a clear architectural frame to set the houses off to advantage, and feeling that garden design had become too much the province of the gardener, decided that their houses needed 'Queen Anne' gardens too, in which architectural elements like walls, elaborate gateways, garden pavilions and flights of steps, formed a sumptuous framework for both house and garden. Architects began to write garden books to promulgate these ideas. The thirty-six year old architect Reginald Blomfield published his wonderfully seductive book 'The Formal Garden in England' in 1892. In this he wrote, not entirely correctly, that 'Till the end of the eighteenth century a tradition of good taste existed in England - a tradition not confined to any one class, but shown not less in the sampler of the village school than in the architecture of the great lord's house [and] it might be said to have lingered on into this century in sleepy country towns'. He goes on to suggest that there may be many trim 'lawyers' houses still with a 'delightful garden bright with old fashioned flowers against the red brick wall, and a broad stretch of velvety turf set off by ample paths of gravel, and at one corner, perhaps, a dainty summer-house of brick, with marble floor and panelled sides; and all so private and sober, stamped with refinement which was once traditional, but now seems a special gift of heaven'. This, however exciting to prospective middle class clients aiming to live refined and sober lives, was almost certainly merely a piece of literary fantasy, however charming. It was a good way of selling some expensive gatehouses, pavilions, gates, steps, and other architectural detailing to the new lawyers (and, naturally, members of all the other professions), who wanted to create for themselves this wonderful picture. Blomfield, astute, also recognised that there was no point in purely architectural nostalgia; it had to embrace the garden's plants too. He mourned the fact (as many of us still do), that few gardeners ever plant apple trees, or even any of our own delectable native trees, but are all hankering after monkeypuzzles or American conifers (now it must be Sorbus cashmiriana or Prunus 'Amanogawa'). He continues: 'Again, the pear tree, the chequer tree, the quince, the medlar, and the mulberry are surely entitled in their beauty to a place in the garden. It is only since nature has been taken in hand by the landscapist and taught her proper position that these have been excluded...' Blomfield saw himself in reaction to the contemporary landscape gardeners' use of dahlias, magenta, asphalt; all, as he thought, in loud and pretentious bad taste. However, it was by no means a blanket approval for any garden before 1725; he loved only the supposed simplicity of the middle decades of the 17th century, and bemoaned the increasing complexity of later 17th century and early 18th century gardens (yet he must have admired Hall Barn), remarking that it was as well that all this pomp was swept away. He passionately loved old fashioned flowers, small scale planning, and delight (and what gardener could gainsay him?). Blomfield's alluring vision of a particular sort of seventeenth century domestic design, though false, was to prove immensely powerful. Because it was also expensive to produce, it settled most frequently around country houses of middling size, though there must have been countless 'cottages' and landless manors whose gardens were soon surrounded by topiary, medlar trees, and filled with the perfumes of jasmine and old fashioned pinks. The book had been splendidly illustrated by Inigo Thomas, and both he and Blomfield went on to design some quite stunning gardens, notably that of Athelhampton, where vast topiary pyramids are set amidst rather French-looking terraces, pavilions, fountains and pools, all glimpsed through magnificent gateways. All are grouped around a magnificent old house, to which only the most successful lawyer could aspire (modern additions to the garden are of lesser quality). Thomas and Blomfield between them, in numerous grand gardens, from Mellerstane to Caythorpe and Parnham House, created a new 'mock' style, sometimes called neo-Georgian, but perhaps better called neo-Kip and Knyff, after the topographical artists who produced dozens of ravishing illustrations of estates and gardens of the period so admired by Blomfield. Publications about the new ideas became themselves grander and grander, reaching a peak when H. Inigo Triggs, an architects draughtsman, produced an extraordinary and glossy sequence of drawings and photographs under the title 'The Formal Garden in England and Scotland' in 1902. This was really an augmentation of Blomfield's work, and intended partly as a source book of authentic formal detailing for those just about to throw out their verbenas. He included all sorts of formal gardens, showing some of the 1850's, like the supposed recreation at Belton House, and the remodelling (in the 1880's) of the upper levels of the ancient garden at Melbourne Hall. He also illustrated some of the lovely new formal gardens being developed in Scotland, including Balcaskie, where the terraces to the south of the seventeenth century house had new balustrades and steps, and some rather dull bedding, Balcarres (where the walled garden was supposed to have many of its original old flowers), Earlshall, with Lorimer's garden of 1891, supposedly based on old plans, and Lorimer's own wonderful and extant garden at Kellie. Of the great English gardens, Arley, Wilton, Longford Castle, St Catherines Court, and so on, the photographs show a wide mixture of styles and successes. Some gardens are only in the high-Victorian mode, with endless ranks of echeverias and fancy variegated geraniums. Some are lovely (like Bridge End); others seem but a sea of gravel, and some are filled with weeds. Other, and non-architectural, writers took up the theme. One wrote in 1895; 'Again, the useful and the beautiful should be happily united, the kitchen and the flower garden, the way to the stables and outbuildings, the orchard, the winter garden, all having a share of consideration and connectedness; and if there be a chance for a filbert walk, seize it...' The writer hated the artistic delights of most conventional and contemporary householders, who were still not yet at all 'Queen Anne', and were even now attached to their 'flower beds shaped as crescents and kidneys - beds like flying bats or bubbling tadpoles, commingled with butterflies and leeches, stars and sausages, hearts and commas, monograms and maggots... and the pretty flowers smile a sickly smile out of their comic beds...' Blomfield's style
of 'architectural' gardening needed long borders to bask against the
walls, and a number of entranced writers pointed out, correctly, that
the ancient gardener wasn't obsessed by parterres, but also liked the
'border beds' that surrounded them. Even so, the new herbaceous
borders, whilst laying claim to descent from seventeenth century
examples, still looked nothing like their ancestors even when filled
with seventeenth century flowers. Writers looked for gardens that
might tell them how old ones really looked. George Milner's garden
book 'Country Pleasures', describes an old long border as a ravishing
mix of bulbs, paeonies, scented herbs and flowers, all overhung by
ancient apple trees (such things sound wonderful on the page, but are
less easy to make and maintain in real life). As to good taste in
such things, he quoted the late seventeenth century Sir William
Temple's motto 'the success is wholly in the gardener',
continuing, 'The qualities to aim at in a flower-garden are
beauty, animation, variety and mystery.' Gardens should be half
commonsense and half romance; he should have added that 'romance'
usually makes maintenance difficult. ================================================================================================== If you have
enjoyed reading thus far, the whole book, plus an appendix on Victorian
flowers and small garden design, is available now for Kindle or
PC. It costs just 3.99 dollars, or the UK equivalent.
It will soon also be available, illustrated, as a paperback in
'author's edition'
|
|
|
|
|
|
|