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For all the images of grace, elegance and serenity
conjured up by the Georgian Age (and indeed, heavily promoted by
the Georgians themselves), it was a period of considerable
turmoil. Even in the apparently rather trivial side-issue
of garden design, arguments about it raged fiercely from at least
the 1730's onwards. The way in which those arguments developed
ensured that garden design began to move into a far more
important position amongst the visual arts than it had ever held
before. So although the gyroscope of taste remained stable
and upright, for at least the middle years of the century, its
movement was fuelled by acrimony and antagonism.
The arguments were mostly about what was 'right',
for it was a widely held belief amongst people rich enough to
care about such matters, and to indulge their visual tastes, that
there were real and absolute standards of taste and beauty, and
fashion quite as real as some of the scientific 'laws' that were
beginning to be discovered. It was as if skirt length, car
design or golf shoes were to be given a philosophical dimension;
many people felt that adhering to such rules and standards of
taste, once they were discovered and proved to be true, were both
socially and even morally necessary. It was all, of course,
fairly ridiculous, even though some of the gardens produced by
the new theories were marvellous.
There
had been, in the eighteenth century, a tremendous break with
tradition. Once the old standards of the formal garden,
which descended in an almost direct line from the ancient
classical world, were destroyed by the 1750's, a number of rival
theories began to gain currency, and often became associated with
other rival sets of opinions, moral and political The
old formal garden had been entirely based on artifice and
symmetry, and grand ones often consisted of immense formal walks,
centred on house or gates, flanked by formal and rectangular
gardens of flowers, box hedges, topiary, or even statuary.
In larger establishments, the gardens near the house were almost
always enclosed by walls, though these were sometimes, at least
late in the life of the formal garden, pierced with sections of
decorative railings so that the countryside beyond could be
admired. Beyond the garden wall, the surrounding parkland
often had vast straight rides cut through it, both for the
convenience of huntsmen, but also for sheer magnificence.
Where a number of these rides crossed one another, formal
pools(in the grandest, surrounding some marvellous pavilion)
mirrored the avenues.
A few fragmentary
remains of these gardens can still be found in Britain, notably
at Hampton Court, Wrest Park, Hall Barn and Newliston, but
thousands of good examples were illustrated by the topographical
artists of the day, or visited by diarists like Celia Fiennes.
For the lesser ones, a glance at almost any modern ordnance
survey map of suitable scale will show remains of avenues, rides,
canals, fishponds, even of parterres, around almost every country
house built before the early eighteenth century.
Even tiny gardens consisted of a few formally
arranged flower beds, box edged, and centred on a sundial, a tank
or water or a pot of carnations. Some will have had
summerhouses, or a small wooden loggia covered with trained
apples or, in warmer parts, a vine. Naturally,
there were important changes of style over the centuries, but
always within a formal framework, and often using much the same
elements and often the same plants.
By
the early eighteenth century, some British gardeners were
beginning to long for something different. Already a few
'wildernesses' had begun to appear; these were a sort of playful
attempt at mimicking 'nature', where trees and bushes were left
unpruned, though the paths, sometimes in daring curves, still had
neat hedges or were bordered by rows of flowers. To the
dissatisfied gardeners, they seemed to offer hints of a way
forward. However, those with an itch for the
new were at a loss to know what any proposed new sort of garden
should actually look like; simply making the wildernesses larger
wasn't enough. There were no informal models available,
though the scholars amongst the dissatisfied knew that some
ancient Roman gardens had had parts that were supposed to look
like the natural landscape. The rich amongst them had also
begun to collect landscape paintings, mostly Italian, and mostly
by masters of the previous century. These paintings came to play
an important role in garden theory for the next century and a
half, even though all the landscapes in them were those of the
imagination, and even though there were other, and more
architectural, factors at work.
In the
1730's, wealthy patrons, having, at least since the Renaissance,
built themselves houses only rather loosely based on ancient
Roman models, began to want houses that used columns, porticoes
and decorative detailing that were copied directly from proper
Roman fragments. They were becoming art historians.
Curiously, instead of searching out real Roman houses themselves,
they preferred to copy someone else who had looked at Roman
remains - the sixteenth century architect Andreas Palladio.
He had used his knowledge of Roman architecture to design some
quite marvellous villas and town palaces in the countryside and
towns near Venice. Eighteenth century British travellers,
visiting these only fairly ancient houses, and much preferring
them to the only slightly Romanised houses they had at home,
wanted similar things for themselves.
Palladio's buildings were often designed as grand
summer retreats, and so were not especially suited to either
British winters, or the ways in which British houses were used.
British architects therefore had to adapt and develop them,
eventually producing a delightful and flexible style that could
cope perfectly with a tiny country house or a vast mansion.
Once the owners had moved into these new and more fully Roman
houses, they were faced with the garden 'problem'.
Renaissance or Baroque houses, whether with Corinthian or Ionic
orders, grand or small, had had Renaissance or Baroque gardens.
These were always formal, proclaiming the artificial nature of
the garden, whether beyond it lay a magnificent hunting park, or
only the lane that led to the village high street.
Now, the great avant garde patrons of eighteenth
century Britain began to want suitably Roman gardens in which to
set their new houses. Managing to ignore the fact that the
formal gardens with which they were so bored were only a few
steps away from what Roman gardens had actually looked like, they
hunted for other sources of information. They were already
passionately in love with the historical and topographical
paintings of several seventeenth century artists, most notably
Claude, but also Caspar Poussin and Salvator Rosa. It
seemed as if their landscapes could be the model for new
gardens.
In the work of the first two
of these artists, figures from Classical mythology, of all ranks
from proper gods to fairly simple shepherds, were often shown
amidst sumptuous but calm landscapes, usually containing equally
sumptuous but fantasticated Roman buildings; sheep often grazed
on perfect meadows in the middle distance, and beyond them was a
perfect view of distant hills and the sea. There was not a
garden wall, a piece of topiary, or a box hedge to be seen.
Beguiled, the grandees wanted something similar for
their houses, and while none wanted to dress in togas, they soon
had swept away their garden walls, every scrap of box, most of
the flowers, every sundial, neighbouring villages, indeed even
nearby hills, so that they could take their carriages over neatly
scythed lawns into the blue distance, along the margins of new
lakes, to play cards or take tea (or to have wild banquets) in
expensive miniaturisations of the Pantheon, the Temple of the
Winds, or, later in the century, the Doric temples of southern
Italy or of Greece itself.
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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'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'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'
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