Chapter Four

THE NEW STYLES

But what sort of style was it that so perfectly suited all these new markets?It was the 'gardenesque' in its parterre mode, and which many gardeners still carry out with great fervour every summer. It began to become 'the rage' in the early nineteenth century; by 1836, the thirty-three year old Paxton could write: "Grouping, or arranging showy plants, en masse, has of late years become so general in all good gardens, that we are somewhat surprised some efficient person has not attempted to give practical instructions, so as to ensure a succession of beautiful flowering plants for this purpose. Although the system has become almost universal, it is, we conceive, but imperfectly understood..." The hints he goes on to give "apply to flower gardens with small detached asymmetrical beds, whether formed upon grass (which is the newest style), or gravel:and as one or two shabby or declining beds spoil the whole effect, the earliest opportunity should be embraced to refit them..."

"...in fact, until the last few years, flower gardens were for the most part a mere secondary object, as far a regards management; ... the principal things in the flower garden were such as annual lupins, thrift, double feverfew, bachelors buttons, honesty etc, with some bulbs, and these planted almost indiscriminately, without reference to height, colour, or duration; there were none of the petunias, dahlias, verbenas, calceolarias, eschscholtzias, and dozens of equally elegant plants that adorn so beautifully our borders and beds at the present time..."

"...There are some who advocate beds with mixed plants... still they never have that striking effect that the same beds would have if filled with suitable plants, arranged in groups, and in large flower gardens we think them decidedly bad" This article from 'Paxton's Magazine of Botany' (the first of any garden magazines that traded upon the reputation of a famous gardener), is Janus-faced, looking backwards to the very beginnings of the bedding system in the earliest nineteenth century (when simple mixtures of hardy flowers were fashionable), and forwards to the fullest heights of the Victorian infatuation.

And of course Paxton was then intending to become that 'Efficient person', though twenty years later, he'd become so grand and so famous that he had rather little to do with the furtherance of garden design. Paxton's ideas about layout were not original. The detached asymmetrical beds to which he refers in these early articles are just the sort already illustrated by Loudon's, and to be found at Dropmore. This, the type location of such things, with its tadpole shapes cut out of the lawns, had beds filled with a simple mixture of two or three species of flowers. Though Loudon's illustrators copied the plans, and should therefore have known, it isn't absolutely clear whether it was actually the first garden where such beds had been made (in general, new developments, whether of science or interior decoration, often happen in several places at once, which inevitably gives rise to later rancours).

Naturally, for such an important development, there were quite soon several claimants, especially once it was clear, that is, that the style was in fact going to become supreme. Everyone likes a touch of glory. The new media provided the forum for other contenders. There were, by mid-century, two; Dropmore, and Campden Hill. The gardener at Campden Hill was a John Caie, and he was beginning to write and talk about the new grouping system (that is, grouping a quantity of plants of the same species by themselves in a single bed), from the late 1830's onwards. He enjoyed writing and talking to such an extent that he gave up gardening altogether some years later to devote his considerable energies (if rather lesser imagination), to writing and editing (his interesting life history can be found on page XX).

Even by 1840, Caie has a paper on the grouping system for flower beds at Campden Hill (fifteen years after they were first illustrated), claiming that that garden was the original location of the style. He was still, at that time, gardener to the Dowager Duchess of Bedford, and the paper includes (usefully for anyone now wanting to copy an 1840's bedding scheme) a rare and rather good colour plate. However, he had already been laying claim to the style for several years: much later, a correspondent to another garden magazine de"Izhe 'Gardeners Chronicle' of the same year about how to start looking for plants to fit the theories.

It also sparked off a controversy that was to last into the 1880's, by which time subtlety had at last prevailed. For instance, a writer to the 'Cottage Gardener' of 1850 opined "There is no doubt that arranging flowers according to their contrast is more pleasing to the eye than placing them according to their harmonies. Consequently, a blue flower should be placed next to an orange flower, a yellow near a violet... ' Another went on 'One of the most beautiful bouquets I ever saw was comprised of a mass of scarlet geraniums interspersed with fairy white roses, and surrounded by half blown double white camellias. A very pretty bouquet for mourning may be formed of white flowers surrounded by double violets. No bouquet is good without a rich green and a dead white"

In this period, then, there was a general passion for deep and intense colours, strongly contrasted. To help the aspiring bedder, a colour wheel plan was published: violet/lavender/blue/sea green/green/olive green/ yellow/apricot/orange/scarlet/red/lilac/violet. Readers could choose neighbours for harmony, opposites for contrast (most respondents liked contrast).

By 1853, McIntosh's 'The Book of the Garden' propounded that 'there has been an improvement of late years in the arrangement of both form and colour in our first-rate flower-gardens; the first step to which was, grouping the plants in masses..."He does at least point out that the numerous examples he gives of colourful planting schemes have no theoretical basis, as no theory yet advanced has proved authoritative. Beauty remains in{the eye of the beholder. McIntosh, as we might expect was a considerable admirer of the three primary colours. These he elaborates into primary harmonies, which are combinations of orange and blue, purple and yellow, green and red. There are also tertiary colours - olive (green mixed with purple), citron (green and orange), russet (orange and purple), as well as secondary harmonies; olive mixed with orange, citron to purple, russet to green.

Finally he can no longer resist giving a few rules: "As a practical rule in planting parterres, the most intense colours should be placed in the centre, gradually softening down towards the margin of the bed or the sides of the garden. "He goes on with page on page of possible colour combinations. "Contrast of colour - The rule in this case is to put one of the primitive colours - red, blue, or yellow - next another of these colours, or some other colour formed by compounding the other two. In bedding plants, wherever a handsome plant of the colour required cannot be obtained for any of the particular beds, white, or some neutral tint, should be employed as a substituted"

Nowhere in any of this, or for that matter, in any of the other gardeners' writings on colour is there any suggestion that flowers may contain several colours, let alone veinings, tones or washes of one colour over another. That would have made it all too difficult to theorise. None of the mid-century garden writers has much to contribute to the debate and the grip of beds in the familiar scarlet, yellow and blue simply tightened. The most interesting comments on colour at this period come, not surprisingly, from interior decorators, artists and architects.

However, it's important to remember that the triumvirate's grip, however much it was shrugged off by those with a sophisticated eye, remained imposed upon the less educated for the entire century, and even now 'Parks Departments' displays show it with sometimes only the slightest modifications... The architect and garden designer Nesfield, who'd already been playing around with the seventeenth century idea of filling parterres with coloured earths and sands (producing some exquisitely subtle colour schemes) waited until 1862 to publish, in the Gardeners Chronicle, some really fine colour combinations that he thought would be good in the flower garden.

The paper is quite long, but some of the nicest include a subtle scheme in buff, olive, grey, and one or two soft greens. It's rather Robert Adam in style. The same magazine also ran an article by Mr Crace, whose firm had become one of the most famous interior decorators in Regency Britain. Speaking at the society of Artists on the colours used at the International Exhibition, he said"Avoid blazing contrasts of colours, such as bright red next bright green; or bright blue next bright yellow; such contrasts are not harmonious... Nothing is so charming and so refreshing to the eye as an harmonious arrangement of colours.. ' He went on to suggest some wonderful sounding colour combinations, some of which{ would look quite marvellous in a garden of the period, as well as stretching the gardeners' imagination for suitable plants.

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Some of the combinations were: black and warm brown,violet and pale green, violet and light rose colour, deep blue and golden brown, chocolate and bright blue, deep red and grey, maroon and warm cream, deep blue and pink, chocolate and pea green, maroon and deep blue, claret and buff, black and warm green. Lovely. Following on from some of these more sophisticated colour ideas, gardeners, men and women, began to take a much more exciting look at the plants in the garden (there was, in any case, a reaction against the botanical poverty of the high-Victorian bedding schemes, so the range of possibilities was suddenly very much wider).

For instance, Miss F J Hope, a suburban Edinburgh spinster, well bred, of forceful and determined character, began a series on flower arranging in the 'Gardeners Chronicle'. She planned this to suit anything from small flower glasses three inches high total ones three feet high. She liked to have the bases covered with some sort of creeper - bryony especially (she seemed to quite like poisonous plants). Some of her schemes were quite central to ordinary Victorian thinking;red or white paeony with, say, the lemon yellow flowers of Hemerocallis flava. More fun, she liked Delphinium formosanum (------)with the greeny pinky and thread-like petals of Tellima grandiflora, or the creamy white spires of Aruncus sylvester, with the cold yellow Aconitum vulparia and the cream variegated leaves of gardener's garters (Phalaris arundinacea 'Elegantissima').

Other of her ideas on which modern gardeners could base a spectacular herbaceous border include mixing scarlet and black Papaver orientalis with straw coloured irises; the creamy Aruncus with the pastel blue leaves and arching grey flower stalks of Avena 'Sterilis'; dark blue and straw-coloured irises with oriental poppy buds; Aarons rod (the native Verbascum thapsus) with Valeriana pyrenaica in red and pink: or roses like the ravishing 'Coupe d'Hebe' with the gorgeous and ancient Lilium candidum, anise-scented leaves of myrrh (she meant Myrrhis odorata, not the biblical myrrh) leaves, and a few passion flower trails. More sumptuous still, she like the blazing and waxy scarlet flowers of Lilium chalcedonicum with the purplish black spikes of Veratrum nigrum.or some of the new peachy yellow flowers of the contemporary hybrids Gladiolus x brenchleyensis and deep blue Agapanthus umbellatus. She carried her ideas for putting plants together in the glass out into the garden, and published some elegant bedding plans.

Some of these we shall meet in a few moments , but here it's worth noting bedding schemes with edgings of rosy Heuchera leaves. Also the lovely double 'Old Bloody Warrior' wallflower with the cream-white froth of meadowsweet in its double form. A bed of China roses with pale autumn crocuses, with heuchera and Mangles geranium leaves. Poinsettia in white teamed with variegated holly. Naturally, everyone soon wanted to play around with colour.

Keeping with the geometric, 'The English Flower Garden' of 188* illustrated an extraordinary 'panel' bed, a marvellous Gothic fabric design carried out both in flowers and, by now, foliage. The flora was fairly standardised, but the final effect must have been gorgeous. Cerastium tomentosum (the formidable snow-in-summer) and Stellaria 'aurea' supplied silver and gold, with lobelias supplying the azure blue ground colour. The unidentified writer suggests that the most sumptuous effects are actually obtained by utilising harmony rather than contrast, and also suggested that if the reader, planning a flower garden, felt that they knew nothing about colour, then it was worth taking a look at wallflowers, auriculas, polyanthus, alstroemerias and spanish irises for ideas of how to combine them with the greatest elegance (still a brilliant idea for today's plantings).

In long borders, he, though quite probably she, suggests keeping colour design constant through the season, but of course using different species, perhaps red wallflowers, followed red oriental poppies, and lastly vast clumps of red hot pokers. The writer's notes have a rather painterly ring, suggesting rather good nostrums like 'purple and lilac do well together, with cold whites and silver foliage, but to add heat, use soft yellow and warm white'. Of white flowers; don't dot them around, and they all look best in broad masses. Of the colour blue; all are difficult to use well (entirely true), but try using them with warm white or palest yellow; they're sometimes best in bed set in grass.

A clue to the author's identity can be found in the passage that suggests a progression in colours along the length of one of the new mixed borders..."start with strong blue; then rose colour, crimson, and strongest scarlet, leading to orange and bright yellow. A paler yellow followed by white would distantly connect the warm colours with the lilacs and purples, and a colder white would combine them pleasantly with low-growing plants with cool coloured leaves..." It must have been early work of Gertrude Jekyll.

However, though her final work was with herbaceous borders, at this date she still needed to acknowledge the bedding systems (as we shall see, there were by now several): she goes on to suggest that silvery leaved plants are valuable as edgings, as well as sumptuous carpets to purple flowers. And of bedding schemes in general, she writes: "Colour in Bedding out - we must here put out of mind nearly all the higher sense of enjoyment that we have in flowers... and must regard them merely as so much colouring matter, to fill such and such spaces for a few months... The introduction of the bedding system changed all this [plants being grown for their own sakes; not as ensembles], and showed the possibility of arranging plants so as to produce a preconceived colour effect... But however useful the bedding system may have been in directing the attention to a brand of garden design previously neglected, it has many drawbacks...'

America followed the discussions of European gardeners with great interest, importing colour schemes and prejudices along with the plants. By the late 1890's, these were widely disseminated, including the still current dislike of the colour magenta, which was thought to be such a discordant one that it should never be allowed into the garden in in any form. White flowers were popular in that country too. At the end of the Victorian period, a slightly unnatural sort of alliance developed between the shattered remnants of the old guard still cherishing their old fashioned gardens with their promiscuous and probably rather untidy mix of flowers, and the advance guard, their refined sensibilities outraged with the vulgar and brilliant show of most contemporary bedding schemes. So the gaudy and glorious High-Victorian garden is sandwiched in between the often provincial and the quite often precious.

More surprising is the quite considerable debt that the next sort of garden, especially ones popularised by Miss Jekyll, in fact owed to the Victorian infatuation. However, to return to the development of bedding itself...

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Within the confines of the new garden ideas current from 1830 or so, gardeners experimented in all sorts of ways, some novel, some strange. For instance, once the half-hardy flora from South America and Africa advocated by Paxton in 1838 had really caught hold throughout Europe, it was an entirely natural progression to try some of the vast numbers of species from even warmer climates, and which were most usually grown in the warmest glasshouses. This idea seems first to have taken root in Europe, perhaps where more severe and longer winters of the continent affected glasshouses more severely that they do in Britain (the growth of algae on the glass being one of the most important difficulties). This led to plants being set outdoors in summer while the glass of the 'stoves' were being cleaned up for the succeeding winter. 'Subtropical' bedding, as it became known, seems first noticed in 1852. 'One thing struck me in the gardening of Germany, which is the love of fine foliage; and whole parterres and clumps are planted solely to exhibit specimens of foliage. I think much might be done in this country with the same object. . Among the different plants... the Ficus elastica appears to be the favourite; the Canna indica, C. discolor and especially the New Zealand flax... There is a large Caladium much used in these parterres... and Maranta zebrina from the stove appears to stand out for the summer...'

Soon every owner of a palm, a cycad,some aloes or cactuses, philodendrons and so on, pushed them into the centre of the bedding schemes. Trials were done in the public gardens of Paris to see which tropical plants would 'do' well, and soon after, such things appeared in Britain. By 1861, William Robinson, however much he came to hate all forms of bedding, thoroughly approved. He wrote that tropical bedding was first seen in Paris using cannas, caladiums, "either in distinct round or oval clumps, or in the tall centres of the flower borders..." In the Paris trials, C. indica won, and remains widely popular. The castor oil plant also turned out to be a winner.

By 1861, too "The practice which embellishes so much of the St Peterburgh gardens during their short summer, of planting out green and hothouse flowering trees and shrubs in single specimens, is also beginning to be tried here with success. They are planted out in May without their pots, and two or three weeks before taking them in in autumn, they are prepared for potting by cutting round their roots" The British at once copied and excelled.

Soon, he reported that Paris has been trying to compete with the rarity of species found in English gardens, but has given up - it was too expensive. Also, there was a vast public outcry over the expense of running the public parks, especially the famous Bois de Boulogne. More oddly, though early bedding schemes had been designed to be of much the same height, often with plants being clipped, pinned, or even sunk in pits so that they would give an even 'carpet' of colour, the idea of 'Picturesque' bedding grew up, mainly advocated by David Thomson, the gardener to the Dukes of Buccleugh at Dalkeith and Drumlanrig. In this, totally at variance as it was with the 'Picturesque' of the early years of the century,the bedding was deliberately contrived to have a vertical element, usually central, often with subsidiary verticals at the edge or in the corners of the beds. Naturally, subtropical plants were often used. Picturesque may not have entirely described the final effect - which survives still in the use of canna lilies,or a standard fuchsia plant, as the central 'dot' plant in a bed of colourful Begonia semperflorens, all edged with alyssum and lobelia.

Though Thomson claimed the development as his, something similar had already been seen by William Robinson, as a young garden correspondent, in Paris. In 1861 he wrote to the Gardeners Chronicle "In general design, straight walks, terraces, steps and parterres are gone quite out of fashion, [I wonder how many headaches this caused in gardens which had just been expensively got up in a geometrical way? - for he was quite wrong] and in Paris appear only to be maintained in the Tuileries and Luxembourg; curved lines, irregular clumps, borders or beds being everywhere substituted. In some places this irregularity may have been carried too far, or too much may have been attempted for the limited space; but in general the sight struck us as remarkably good... and in the Champs Elysees, the arrangement of the raised clumps and slightly hollowed intervening lawns is such as to give variety and an appearance of extent. Some persons object to the clumps being too much raised, but in the Champs Elysees...it gave the means of shutting out in great measure the cafes chantants"

Contemporaries, even a more mature Robinson, approved, finding that it did much to reduce the glare of the less harmonious colour schemes, especially if it was done in the big central bed of a group. Contemporaries, too, thought 'picturesque' beds looked best if they were given outlines using a long wagon rope, and curling it into shapes on the lawn (modern garden magazines suggest using a plastic hosepipe to make 'island' beds). More widespread was the development of 'ribbon bedding'. This was an enttirely natural progression from the idea of contrasting margins, and meant that effectively the whole bed consisted of contrasting margins, or bands of colour.

It was foreshadowed in the 1840's, for instance by this planting scheme of 1842 from the 'Gardeners Chronicle'; "Many of our Correspondents are desirous of knowing what plants are best adapted for a circular or oval bed upon a lawn... 'The writer suggests "In the centre... a patch of purple Phlox paniculata should replanted, around which should succeed a circle of the white variety of the same plant. Then follows a ring of Coreopsis tinctoria, after which may come one of Penstemon gentianoides, and P. gentianoides 'coccineum', but most of the latter. Next plant a circle of Phlox omniflora, surrounded by one of the tallest sorts of pink verbena; then another of the dwarfer kinds of scarlet verbena: the outside of the whole bed being planted with Lobelia azurea...' By 1862, even Kew gardens had an example that was typical of the whole phenomenon, and drew all London by its magnificence. "It is however in four beds forming a necessary accompaniment of this central mass in which by far the prettiest mixture is to be found. These are about forty five feet in length and a trifle more than eight feet in width.. Along the centre forming a chain is a series of diamonds measuring four feet in the side, made with Perilla [a bedding plant, now rare, with deep brownish red leaves]; inside the diamond is 'Flower of the Day' geranium, from which the flowers are kept constantly cropped [the plant had yellowish green leaves]; outside, the angles are occupied with 'Lord Raglan' verbena, and round the whole is an edging made of variegated Alyssum and Lobelia speciosa planted alternately, the white and the blue associating well together and forming an agreeable and pretty contrast. "

Elsewhere in the same garden and at the same date variegated balm (Melissa officinalis) was used as an edging, and kept pinched out to stop it sprawling "...and in front of the old museum in what have been popularly named by the daily press a 'Coventry ribbon' is a long bed containing lines of equal width (about fifteen inches) of the following plants, viz. , in the centre Perilla; on each side of that Cineraria maritima [silver, almost white, leaves] surrounded by an edging of 'Purple King' and 'Robinsons Defiance', the two last forming a charming mixture of scarlet and purple. This ribbon being quite thirty yards in length... is even better this year than last..."

Three years earlier, Shirley Hiberd had been using the ribbon system in not only his flower borders, but also in large containers. So enamoured was he by it that even his winter bedding (of fancy beets and coloured cabbages) was 'ribboned'. The summer colours were this; purple, cerise, pale yellow, crimson. The beds were edged with white tiles. Later, ribbon borders were commonly used, in the late 1860's and 70's, alongside walks and paths, to give a continuous dazzle that must, in some instances, have given many walkers a headache. They were also wrapped around shrubberies, to form a sort of doily of colour around the fashionable planting of evergreens. And then there was 'Carpet bedding'; this phrase is now commonly used incorrectly, often applied to any sort of bedding. Originally, it was used only for a specialised sort that consisted only of foliage plants, or some of the more usual bedding things, but with their flowers continually suppressed. Carpet bedding, making use of all the shades of green, bronze, yellow, russet, purple, glaucous blue and silver, meant that the palette of colours was extremely subtle, and could at least begin to approach the washed-out colours of faded Persian carpets. There were other advantages than merely to the eyes; the conventional bedding flora was quite often ruined by continued rain, and a poor summer could rot every garden in the country. Foliage was not so affected by the weather. It was also possible to use it in cold areas, so it worked as well in Caithness (where geraniums and lobelias refused to grow and flower outdoors) as it did in Cornwall.

It also taxed gardeners' minds a little more fully than the conventional combination of verbenas, calceolarias and geraniums; some interesting plants were made use of, splittng into two separate divisions, depending on whether the plants were winter hardy or not. It seems today as if it might also have been less labour intensive; that was not the case, for almost every plant needed to be manipulated in some way, whether having its flowers regularly nipped out, or the stems kept trimmed so that they didn't swamp the design. As with flower bedding, there were some spectacular examples. In 1871, for instance, a big carpet scheme at Mr Cannell's of the Woolwich Fuchsia nursery was thirty four feet long and eleven wide. It contained two thousand and nine hundred plants to a value of sixty pounds. Many visitors thought it the finest they'd ever seen.

The redoubtable Miss Hope published her perennial carpet schemes which required little in the way of replacement: she used edgings of Heuchera leaves, and sedums and houseleeks for a base planting, adding a few geraniums in summer. She also used much more unconventional plants like the exciting but invasive variegated bishopweed, and the nice variegated cress that she found in a nursery in Berwickshire (both are still worth having). Towards the end of the century this sort of perennial carpet bedding began to evolve into what we now call 'ground cover bedding'. Miss Hope seems to have been the first to publish plantings that approach the idea. In 'Garden and Woodland' of 1881, she says that the mania for proper bedding is on wane. It is surprising that her own nice ideas didn't prolong its life; one bed she had centred on a yellow-leafed holly, with an outside edging of Euonymus radicans 'variegata', with aground of Aster ericoides and the now rare and almost impossible-to-grow double sweet William 'King Willie'!In another she had the pink-flowered Ononis rotundifolia and Dactylis glomerata 'variegata'. She also had four beds of the lovely white pink called 'Mrs Sinkins' mixed with late-flowering red tulips and Scilla bifolia, all edged with brown leaved Heuchera. Miss Hope also used clematis 'Jackmanii' pegged to the ground, with the bed edged with variegated periwinkle (she doesn't say which species, though the large Vinca major would look best), and in another late-flowering bed, the lovely Anemone 'Honorine Jobert' alternated with a dark red chrysanthemum called 'Bob', edged with yet more brown heuchera. More exotic still for the grey suburbs of Trinity, she had Yucca gloriosa set in a groundwork of purple-leaved Ajuga, all dotted with the rosy leaves and flower heads of Sedum spectabile, and edged with a variegated ivy. That sounds a little too much.

Then William Robinson, at the end of a tirade against bedding in all its forms (one of many), in which he says appreciation of beauty of form is far more intellectual and advanced than appreciation of colour (a typically one-sided statement), he goes on to suggest sweet woodruff, and other carpeters as underplanting for a shrubbery. He describes "Mr Brockbank's border", which is a sort of permanent bedding with an otherwise conventional guilloche pattern. However, other borders in same garden had no fixed lines at all, and begin to resemble some designed by a Mr F Miles who, it appears, was the first to see the merits of natural carpeting beds. From the plan of his most important border, it looks as if it would have been an excellent mixed planting of today, complete with an irregular drifts of bulbs and shade plants. It therefore begins to approach the waved patches of 'bedding' that Gertrude Jekyll eventually proposed for some of her marvellous herbaceous beds.

All these sorts of bedding, all aspects of the gaudy infatuation provoked strong reactions from the small minority of gardeners immune to all the excitements offered. As with all gardening styles, widely adopted, many must have been dull, unimaginative, even ugly. In the hands of a good gardener, with a good eye, the effects of a high-Victorian garden must have been quite magnificent.

But what did these gardens actually look like? We know how some of them appeared from photographs which survive in large numbers; for the early gardens of the period though, there is no record. For the gardens of Campden Hill, all we have are Caie's planting lists, published in 1850, and a handful of woodcuts. However, the lists themselves are instructive, giving colour (at least in part) to the plans and views. The February/March lists for the bedding include Helleborus niger, Crocus reticulatus, Galanthus plicatus, Narcissus minor, Erythronium dens-canis, (usually violet pink, but here some were in white), Corydalis tuberosa, Erythronium lanceolata. The colour triumivrate is present, though in the softened colours of spring. In April/May he used Anemone appennina (probably then in sky blue only), Arabis praecox (he probably meant a white A. caucasica), Cheiranthus alpina (now Erysimum, and in brilliant yellow), Aubretia in purple, Alyssum saxatile, Iberis saxatile, Tulipa oculis-solis (red and black), Polemonium mexicanum (blue, he says, though it is not clear which species he meant)), Vesicaria utriculatum (light yellow). Sometimes, for the same season, he used hardy annuals, like Silene pendula (?), Nemophila in white and blue, the still popular Eschscholtzia, the now rare Collinsia grandiflora (bluish purple), Clarkia in white and rosy purple and, lastly, Erysimum Peroffskianum. Then, for the gaudy season from May to November he used the usual range of things like geranium 'Lucea rosea' (rose), the verbenas 'Princess Royal' (white), 'Heloise' (dark lilac), 'White Perfection', 'Duc d'Aumale' (bluish lilac), 'Robinsons Defiant' (scarlet), 'Mont Blanc' (white), and 'Waltons Emma' (purple). For bright yellow he used the inevitable Calceolaria viscosissima. He published an attractive colour plan of the scheme.

The later part of the period is captured in Trigg's 'The Formal Garden in England and Scotland'. This contains, as well as Trigg's wonderful architectural drawings and plans of old or at least partly old gardens and garden detailing, some marvellous photographs of all sorts of gardens, from the most grandly Italianate of all, to town and country cottage gardens. Some are photographed still at the height of their glory, others are clearly on the slide to dereliction and extinction. For instance, Longford Castle still had very elaborate parterres, with many of the beds edged with echeveria. There were Chinese barrel seats along the main walk, and solid masses of echeverias and sedums around statue bases and urns. The terrace walls were built of fake Roman roof tiles, but finished with stone tops and balls. There were also vast amounts of gravel, with almost no grass to walk on at all, even though the beds had narrow edges of it, and inner bands of alternate blue and white lobelias and alyssums. The final effect was of slightly tattered richness, for the walks need weeding, and the echeverias are planted with slightly less than perfect regularity.

Another example, also lacking maintenance, but this time with charm, were the gardens at Catherines Court in Somerset. Here, fine stone statuary was set amidst rather narrow formal beds planted with fancy variegated geraniums, dahlias, nicotianas and so on. Everything is rather rampant and only the Irish yews as obelisks give green vertical axes. It must have been a delightful place in which to wander. And so on... Broughton Castle with its attractive rose garden, rustic chairs, and a desert-full of gravel; Bowood, whole then, but with the parterres empty for winter, leaving only the grass cut-outs and a few standard roses, or Wilton, with its already overgrown parterre, simply planned with an apse end, relaxed in feel, with Chinese ceramic seats and masses of wire 'baskets' holding ramshackle masses of flowers. And on, through Hatfield and Kellie and Earlshall, Arley, Thoresby, and Eaton Halls, Melchet Court, Compton Place... Gardens waiting for the next revolution certainly, but none of the photographs give any idea of the astonishing richness of the Victorian garden flora.

end

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