reading

Gardens are amongst the fastest-growing visitor attractions today – in the UK alone 15 million people will visit a garden this year. How to Read an English Garden is the essential book for every garden lover. It provides an account of the different elements of gardens of all ages and explains their meaning and their history: here, you’ll find the answer to such questions as: when were tulips introduced into our gardens, and what was ‘tulip-mania’? What is a knot-garden, and what was the origin of its design? Who was ‘Capability’ Brown, and how did he get his name? Why are mazes such a common feature in English garden design?

In addition, the book explains how lawns, flowerbeds, trees and ponds came to be a feature not just of grand houses but of gardens everywhere. Among the many subjects covered are: garden design, plant introductions and collectors, kitchen gardens, water gardens, and garden styles from around the world, and from medieval gardens right through to the present day.

Clearly laid out and beautifully illustrated, How to Read an English Garden brings historic and modern gardens to life: a book to accompany garden visitors everywhere, or to be enjoyed and dipped into at home.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Richard Taylor is the author of How to Read a Church. Dr Andrew Eburne is editor of the Garden History Journal and a consultant for historic gardens including Blickling Hall in Norfolk and Marble Hill in London. Richard and Andrew met while studying English at Oxford and have been close friends for almost twenty years.

Garden Creation ~ Gardens & Change ~ Gardens & Space ~ The Experience of Gardens ~ Gardens & Nature ~ Gardens & Society ~ A Brief History of English Garden Design ~ English Garden Designers ~ Plant Collecting & Cultivation

Drives ~ Approaches ~ Ridings ~ The State of the Roads ~ Reading the Entrance & Beyond

The Birth of Flowers ~ Flower Journeys ~ Travelogue of Popular Flowers ~ Bulbs, Bankers & Tulipomania ~ Flower Gardens ~ Cottage Gardens ~ Pleasure Grounds ~ Pleasure Gardens ~ Beds & Borders ~ Borders ~ Bowling Greens & Bowling Alleys ~ Lawns ~ Lawnmowers ~ Meadows & Meads ~ Ornamental Grasses ~ Rosaries ~ Shrubberies ~ Turf Seats

Kitchen Gardens ~ Specialist Areas & Techniques ~ Bee Gardens ~ Cherry Gardens, Grounds & Yards ~ Ferme Ornée ~ Hop Gardens, Grounds & Yards ~ Orchards ~ Physic Gardens ~ Slips ~ Vineyards

Basins ~ Canals ~ Cascades ~ Cold Baths ~ Fountains ~ Giocchi d’Acqua ~ Lakes ~ Moats ~ Ponds ~ Streams & Rills ~ Waterfalls

Banqueting Houses ~ Bridges ~ Camellia Houses ~ Claire Voies ~ Cottages Ornées ~ Dovecotes ~ Follies ~ Garden Furniture ~ Gazebos ~ Greenhouses, Glasshouses & Conservatories ~ Grottoes ~ Ha-has ~ Hermitages ~ Hothouses ~ Lodges ~ Mounts ~ Orangeries ~ Paths & Walks ~ Patios ~ Pergolas ~ Sheds & Bothies ~ Statues & Herms ~ Store Circles ~ Summer-Houses ~ Sundials ~ Temples ~ Terraces ~ Trellis ~ Walls & Fences

THE INSPIRATION FOR this book came to Richard Taylor in the wake of the overwhelming response to his How to Read a Church, published in 2003. Gardens and parks are among the most popular visitor attractions in the UK today: it’s estimated that over 15 million of us will make such a visit this year. Yet for the growing band of garden visitors there is only limited guidance as to what they will find in the course of their visit and how they might understand it. There are many academic studies of garden history and a number of popular accounts, but between these books on the one hand, and the various leaflets and guides sold by the gardens themselves on the other, there seemed a gap. Richard’s inspiration was to supply that missing piece of the garden lover’s jigsaw by writing a book that explains each of the many elements that make up the historic garden and how they got there. To help him he turned to one of his oldest friends, Andrew Eburne. Andrew is a garden historian and consultant, but twenty years ago he and Richard lived on opposite sides of the same staircase as they studied English together at Oxford. Together they planned the book that follows. The writing itself has been Andrew’s responsibility, but Richard’s advice and counsel, and his comments on and suggestions for each completed chapter, have been an essential and invaluable part of that process. The result, they hope, is a book that adds something to what Francis Bacon called ‘the purest of human pleasures’: the garden.

Vivid high-Victorian bedding, recently restored at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire.

The eighteenth-century harmony of water, wood and stone in the gardens of Studley Royal, Yorkshire.

Show me your garden…and I will tell you what you are like

ALFRED AUSTIN

HOW DO YOU go about ‘reading’ a garden? For Francis Bacon (1561–1626), a garden was famously ‘the purest of human pleasures’; for many of us today a garden is simply there to be enjoyed. Human beings have been gardening for 4000 years, however, and behind even the simplest domestic garden there lie centuries of imagination, exploration and experimentation. This book describes and explains each of the many elements that combine to create the modern or historic garden: from lawns to lilies, from vegetables to vineyards, from canals to cascades. Understanding these elements – the role they play within gardens, and how they came into existence – can make even that purest of pleasures still richer and more complete.

This is not intended to be a book about garden history: there are specialist works on that subject, and some of these are listed in the suggestions for further reading (see here). But we will draw widely on garden history – partly because so many of the gardens open to visitors have a special historic quality or condition, and partly because events in garden history can have consequences for the most basic constituents of our own gardens. If, for example, an ambitious Scottish nurseryman, Charles Lawson, had not introduced Italian rye grass to Britain in 1833, and the Lawson’s cypress from California in 1854, our lawns and hedges would look very different today. Lawson was trying to break traditions, and went bankrupt in the effort, but he changed the ordinary domestic garden for ever. When we consider the role played by the lawn in front of a great country house, or in our own back garden, the stories of people such as Charles Lawson will inevitably inform our reading. History – described 2000 years ago as lux veritatis (the light of truth) – is our own, indispensable reading-light.

GARDEN CREATION

GARDENS ARE THE consequence of a meeting between human beings and the natural organic world around them. Their basic requirements are simple. Water, whether natural or irrigated. Light. A growing medium – which can be soil, or a pool of water. Protection from extremes of temperature or wind, if necessary: walls, fences or hedges. And a means for us to experience and enjoy the garden: paths and seats. Probably the first successful attempt to meet those requirements was made in the temple gardens of the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East (a strip of land comprising the lower Nile Valley, the eastern Mediterranean coast, Syria and Mesopotamia) some 4000 years ago – though even today some gardeners (including the present writers) will struggle to do so. Over many centuries, however, the creation of gardens has been marked by ever-increasing diversity, sophistication and elaboration. Those developments, and the traces they have left behind them, will be explored in the chapters that follow. First and foremost, though, gardens are created places. Inevitably they reflect our feelings about ourselves, our place in the world, even our intellectual identity; it is perhaps no coincidence that so many of the walls and enclosures that characterized pre-Reformation gardens were demolished in the eighteenth century to create the unbounded gardens of a restless Enlightenment. To read a garden is to read a story of historic human interest.

GARDENS & CHANGE

GARDENS NEVER STAND STILL. This is a truth known to anyone who has ever wielded a spade or trowel: if this year you don’t do your weeding, next year the garden will be unrecognizable. But it’s also true on a much larger scale, and those changes make our task as garden investigators both more difficult and more fascinating.

The garden’s vulnerability to change and decay has often been explored symbolically, as this Renaissance woodcut of Death in the garden shows.

The earliest gardens in history were adjuncts to temples or palaces, and it remains the case that most historic and, indeed, domestic gardens were laid out for the first time when the house beside them was built. Gardens, however, are more vulnerable to neglect than buildings. A neglected building may stand for a century, but a neglected garden will vanish far sooner.

Gardens, too, get changed more radically than buildings: they are after all both cheaper and easier to change. When, for example, Robert Walpole (1676–1745), Britain’s first prime minister, built his great house at Houghton in Norfolk in the early eighteenth century, he spent about £22,000 on the building, and £900 on the gardens (the equivalent of £2.8 million, and £110,000 today). It was the most expensive house in the country, and inevitably it prompted a lot of envy. When one of Walpole’s less well-off neighbours, John Hobart, wished to improve his house, he couldn’t afford to change the building – fortunately for us, as it was and remains a fine Jacobean mansion. Instead, he ripped out almost every trace of the original gardens and replaced them with a modish, bare layout. Of course, great houses experience changes too: some are given new façades or new wings; some are rebuilt entirely. But generally speaking, gardens have experienced more change, and of a more profound nature, than the buildings they were born with – through neglect, or deliberate redevelopment, or a combination of the two.

What are the consequences of this? Historic gardens are a patchwork. It is very rare that a garden is entirely razed and begun again from scratch; there are always survivals from an earlier layout – forgotten corners, plants or trees. Even John Hobart overlooked some walls and trees from the previous century. Other gardens experience instead a cycle of neglect and renewal; whilst for many historic gardens – including some of the most famous – redevelopment is more a process of accretion: different bits added on by different owners and designers in different ages. The gardens at Stowe in Buckinghamshire are a good example. First laid out in the late seventeenth century, they have substantial additions made by Charles Bridgeman in the 1720s, by William Kent in the 1730s, and by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown in the 1750s – and the work of all three designers was modified in succeeding centuries. We call Stowe an eighteenth-century garden, but a visitor in 1725 would have seen a garden completely different from the one on view in 1750, and completely different again from the one in 1800, let alone in 2000. Most historic gardens, then, represent a palimpsest of different historic periods. This makes every garden unique, and it also makes it harder to read. To do so successfully is to recognize the role that different elements of different ages play in the unique character of the whole.

A bird’s eye view of Hampton Court, drawn by Johannes Kipp in the early 18th century and showing the lavish formal gardens created by William and Mary.

GARDENS & SPACE

IT IS WORTH NOTING that gardens also reflect attitudes to space, and that these too change over time. Medieval flower gardens were enclosed and small – often very small by modern standards – while eighteenth-century gardens were expansive and open. The recreation of Queen Eleanor’s thirteenth-century garden (or herber) that you can see today at Winchester Castle in Hampshire measures a modest 30 × 90 feet (9 × 27 m). Queen Anne’s eighteenth-century garden at Hampton Court in Surrey, on the other hand, covered 74 acres (30 hectares). This is not because Queen Anne had more money – she was actually rather hard up – but because the idea of a private garden and the space allocated to it had expanded enormously in the intervening 500 years.

Of course, medieval landowners had their parks, too – usually for raising and hunting deer. But these were very much private affairs, often with high walls – and when it came to the smaller flower gardens near a grand house, privacy again seems to have been high on the list of desired attributes. Arbours that could not be seen into, seats that were not overlooked, hedges that kept the outside world at bay…these elements appear frequently in garden descriptions from the period. Indeed, the medieval flower garden was often called hortus conclusus – a garden that is enclosed, confined, or shut up. In one sense, these spaces are alien to us; in another, they have proved remarkably resilient. Twentieth-century gardens are often arranged as a series of ‘rooms’ divided by walls or high hedges: the gardens at Sissinghurst in Kent and at Hidcote in Gloucestershire are good examples of these. They were inspired by the Anglo-Italian fashions of the early twentieth century, which revived the gardens of the Italian Renaissance, and the tradition of the giardino segreto (secret garden). The giardino segreto was itself a direct descendant of the hortus conclusus. When we enjoy the separateness of a garden ‘room’, its almost magical creation of its own world and atmosphere, we share a pleasure with the medieval gardeners of 700 years ago.

During the eighteenth century these priorities were to a considerable extent reversed. Enclosures were thrown down, walls demolished, hedges grubbed up. The familiar image of the country house marooned in acres of lawn dates from this period. One of the most important practical contributions to this isolation was the invention of the ha-ha. A ha-ha is essentially an invisible wall: a wall (sometimes a fence or hedge) built inside a ditch so that you can’t see it until you are very near. The word ‘ha-ha’, originally French, derives from the exclamation of surprise made by the visitor on discovering this barrier (or perhaps on falling into it). The practical consequence of the ha-ha was two-fold: it meant that you could keep livestock away from the house, but enjoy views from the house without the interruption of walls or fences. For the first time the garden could seem a continuous part of the parkland or farmland beyond. So it was said of the revolutionary eighteenth-century designer William Kent, ‘he leapt the fence, and saw that all Nature was a Garden’. When all nature is your garden, the possibilities are literally infinite. Our sense of space is crucial to our sense of what is possible in a garden.

The Privy Garden at Hampton Court, restored to its late-17th-century condition in 1995.

THE EXPERIENCE OF GARDENS

IN A WAY THIS BOOK is all about the experience of gardens, and how the quality of that experience can be improved by our knowledge and understanding of what gardens contain. But it’s also worth considering the way in which we experience gardens. A single example will suffice. Almost every garden, however large or small, will possess in it somewhere a seat. Where that seat is located may have something to do with the plants nearby, especially if they are scented. It may, if the owner is fond of sun-bathing, have to do with the amount of sunshine available – or, if not, with the amount of shade. Almost invariably, however, a garden seat will be placed to provide us with something to look at. But the idea itself – of experiencing the garden as ‘something to look at’ – has a quite limited and specific history.

We think of gardens, parkland and countryside as types of landscape; we call the professionals responsible for the design of green spaces ‘landscape architects’. But ‘landscape’ is a painting term: it comes from the Dutch word landskip, which was borrowed by the English of Shakespeare’s time to describe a kind of picture. It was only in the early eighteenth century that ‘landskip’ began to be applied to the natural, physical world, and inevitably it suggests a very particular way of looking at gardens and parks. The poet and gardener William Shenstone (1714–63) coined the term ‘landscape gardener’ because he thought that gardens ought to be designed by landscape painters. The guide to Shenstone’s garden, The Leasowes (Warwickshire), instructed visitors to see the garden as a sequence of ‘landskips’, ‘pictures’ and ‘sketches’. This was the beginning of what came to be known as the ‘picturesque movement’. It turned gardens and parks into very static things: the best garden is just like a picture. A special looking-glass could be purchased, called a ‘Claude glass’, after the neo-classical painter Claude Lorrain (1600–82). It consisted of a rather gloomy oval mirror: so that instead of looking at the real garden, you looked at its reflection in the mirror – and saw the muted, framed colours of an Old Master. And if the gardens were static, so in a way were the visitors: passive spectators, confined to a numbered sequence of views – often not even moving to the next viewpoint by themselves, but transported in sedan chairs or carriages. A garden experienced without effort.

The geometric forms of the 17th-century garden are not always sympathetic for modern gardeners. But these Oxford gardens show how much variety of shape and planting could be achieved within a small area.

One curious consequence of this is that in the larger eighteenth-century landscape gardens we are often at the wrong height to appreciate exactly what is going on. The grounds were designed so that the very best views were available from the perspective of a visitor seated in a carriage: a metre or so lower, on foot, and sometimes the effect is lost. By the close of the nineteenth century, however, fashion had turned to more untamed spaces – so-called ‘wild gardens’: not landscapes to gaze upon passively, but wildernesses to lose yourself in. Some of today’s favoured garden features – the wildflower meadow, for example – date from that period.

The underlying relationship, however, remains the same: different types of garden provide a different kind of experience for their visitors – and sometimes even impose one. But garden-makers and visitors still preserve their own expectations, their own sense of what constitutes the perfect or proper garden – and, if you like, a dialogue between each other. And all these will help determine the final experience.

William Robinson’s garden at Gravetye Manor, Sussex, showing the interplay between natural planting and formal stonework.

GARDENS & NATURE

GARDENS, AS WE have noted, are the outcome of a meeting between human beings and the natural world. But just how natural, or unnatural, is that outcome? The question may seem academic, yet it has shaped the way people have seen and created their gardens for almost 300 years. The development of the English landscape garden was due in part to a desire to see gardens as paintings. Ironically, it was also driven by a desire for gardens to be more natural – or perhaps more like the exquisite scenes of nature depicted by landscape painters. The essayist Joseph Addison, who in 1712 urged his readers to turn their gardens into ‘landskips’, declared in the same paragraph that ‘there is generally in Nature something more Grand and August, than what we meet with in the Curiosities of Art’. Addison described his own garden as ‘a natural Wilderness’, with flowers growing ‘in the greatest Luxuriancy and Profusion’, trees in ‘as great a Wildness as their Natures will permit’, and a stream running ‘in the same manner as it would do in an open Field’. In fact, Addison’s garden was rather more strait-laced than this, but the terms of the debate had been set. Out went ‘unnatural’ formality, symmetry and straight lines. In came ‘natural’ informality, assymetry and ‘serpentines’. As William Kent is reported to have said, ‘Nature abhors a straight line’. This has become a well-established means of describing gardens: the gardens of the Elizabethans, and of the seventeenth century, are formal; the English landscape garden of the eighteenth century is informal. Gardens such as those created in the early twentieth century by Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll (Hestercombe in Somerset, for example) are a mixture of the two – strict architectural lines softened by luxuriant planting. Of course, the debate itself did not stand still. In the later eighteenth century the landscape gardens designed by Capability Brown in the ‘natural’, informal tradition came to be seen by some as being overly manicured – having too much ‘smoothness’ about them – and were therefore condemned as unnatural. The natural preference turned instead towards ‘roughness’ – and so the debate rumbled on.

The gardens at Hestercombe, Somerset, were designed by Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll. Lutyens’ strong architectural lines are softened by Jekyll’s planting.

The Temple of Concord and Victory at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, placed within an idealized Arcadian landscape.

The great advocate of roughness in gardens was Sir Uvedale Price (1747–1829), who lived in the suitably rugged Welsh borders. Price was ferocious in argument, but had thought deeply about landscape. His conclusion was that a house and garden required a kind of gradation between what was artificial and what was natural. The house was the most artificial, and stood at the centre of the landscape. Then came the formal gardens, still relatively artificial; then more informal gardens; then parkland, which was very like ‘natural’ landscape; and finally the open countryside beyond.

Ironically for a man writing from the heart of Romanticism, Price’s idea resurrected one of the great precepts of the Renaissance: that the garden should be an extension of the architecture of the house. His model does not of course apply to every garden, but it was very influential, and something like this gradation between the natural and the artificial can be seen in many historic gardens today.

GARDENS & SOCIETY

IN READING A GARDEN we should always be aware of its social and political context. Indeed, those contexts are sometimes difficult to ignore. When the 1st Duke of Beaufort drove an avenue of beech trees in a straight line 2½ miles (4 km) from his front door, his decision was in part aesthetic, but it was also undoubtedly political – the ultimate statement of power and ownership for a man who, in the late seventeenth century, ruled Gloucestershire as his own personal kingdom (you can still see the avenue today). Similarly, when Lord Cobham in 1732 was outmanoeuvred in government by the brilliant and unscrupulous Robert Walpole, he retired to his gardens at Stowe and promptly filled them with buildings and statues satirizing his political opponents and their ideology. The Temple of Ancient Virtue depicted those figures from the past to whom Cobham and his political allies looked for inspiration; the nearby Temple of Modern Virtue was built as a ruin containing a single mutilated torso in contemporary dress – perhaps a portrait of Walpole himself.

More generally, it’s true that – until very recently – the gardens we visit have tended to be the gardens of the historic upper classes. The temptation is therefore to see gardens as the preserve of the upper classes, functioning primarily as a kind of status symbol. It’s an attractive theory, but it has its limitations. To take just one example: as we’ve seen, the first ornamental gardens were almost certainly adjuncts of temples rather than private houses, created for spiritual reasons as much as temporal ones. This reminds us that the impulses behind garden creation are not simply those of social status, but are both more complex and more profound, having to do with our relationship with the natural world, with our sense of self, and with our sense of space and its value – alongside more narrow and easily defined factors, such as the desire to impress our neighbours. It’s also worth noting that visiting gardens has been a favoured occupation of those with leisure for many centuries, and that those with leisure today can scarcely be divided by class. During the eighteenth century a visit to the gardens of the elite might well have been restricted to ‘persons of quality’ (though there were notable exceptions). By contrast, at the start of the twenty-first century one of the most visited gardens in England is Cornwall’s Eden Project – a re-creation, in vast greenhouses called ‘biospheres’, of different climates and flora from around the world. This is gardening not as an aristocratic plaything, but as an educational enterprise; financed not by inherited millions, but by a charitable trust. Finally, we should remember that garden-making itself has always been a democratic occupation, and that in the modern age the gardens of the historic middle and working classes are of increasing interest to visitors and historians alike.

One case in which social concerns rightly predominate is in the role played by women. There have always been rich, usually aristocratic males creating gardens of exceptional importance, whether it be Lord Lumley in the sixteenth century or Lord Cobham in the eighteenth. But the historical baseline running quietly and continuously behind these spectacular achievements is one of a traditional division of labour, difficult to understand for us but commonplace in its own day: men tend the orchards and their fruit, while women tend the flower and kitchen garden. As Thomas Tusser (c.1524–1580) wrote in one of the very earliest English gardening books, Wife, unto thy garden! It is still possible to see areas called ‘My Lady’s Garden’ in grounds laid out during the eighteenth or nineteenth century, and some of the finest historic flower gardens in England owe their existence to women.

The Temple of British Worthies at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, is one of the most overtly political garden buildings, celebrating sixteen ‘Worthies’ from British history admired by Lord Cobham’s Whig party.

IT IS SCARCELY POSSIBLE within the confines of this book to do justice to the variety of English garden design and to the achievement of English garden designers over the past 500 years and more. However, as the names of certain designers and of certain periods in the history of gardens will recur in the pages that follow, we offer here a brief summary of the principal influences.

ROMAN GARDENS

THE BEST EXAMPLES of Roman gardens visible today are to be found around the shores of the Mediterranean (there are some fine remains in North Africa). They are rare in England, though the Roman villa at Fishbourne in Sussex has a recreated garden. Of course, a ‘Roman garden’ could occur just about anywhere in Europe across a period of up to 500 years, so we should be wary of generalizations. That said, Roman gardens can be broadly divided into the enclosed, formal city gardens, and the more open and informal villa gardens of the countryside. Examples of the former include the many peristyle gardens of Pompeii and Herculaneum. A peristyle is a covered colonnade (rather like a cloister) running round the garden, and these smaller city gardens would be designed in straight lines, with statues and wall-paintings, and water in ponds, fountains and bird-baths. Larger gardens can be seen at imperial villas such as that at Tivoli, near Rome, or in the villas of provincial governors, such as Pliny the Younger (c. 61– c. 115) (e.g. Tusculum near Frascati). Very little of this type of gardening can be seen today in England, but its influence is everywhere. Medieval gardens, including the hortus conclusus, draw deeply on Roman models, while the rediscovery of Roman villa gardens, and the descriptions found in Pliny’s letters, drove garden fashions in the early eighteenth century.

MEDIEVAL GARDENS

NO ORIGINAL MEDIEVAL GARDEN survives, though several have been re-created in England and elsewhere in Europe. Our knowledge of medieval gardens really begins three centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, with the rise of Charlemagne in the eighth century. Several garden types have been identified: the kitchen garden; the physic garden for medicinal herbs; the herber or enclosed flower garden; the orchard – used primarily for relaxation, not food; the deer park; and the landscape park, or pleasance. Vineyards were also commonly planted, especially by monasteries. Although the total number of known plant species was very small – perhaps 300 – the range of plants grown might surprise a modern gardener: the two centuries after the Norman invasion (1066) were among the warmest in England’s recorded history, and until the weather cooled around 1400, many plants later confined to more southerly climes could be grown in English (and Scottish) gardens.

A 16th-century woodcut showing a geometric garden with a covered arbour and a trellised balustrade surrounding the central bed.

TUDOR & ELIZABETHAN GARDENS

TUDOR GARDENS WERE designed to be seen first from above, from the upper floor of the house. They were laid out formally, in squares ornamented by knots (see here). Henry VIII’s garden at Hampton Court was described as ‘so enknotted it cannot be expressed’. Within the garden, mounds of earth called ‘mounts’ also provided raised viewing areas. Walks were often covered; mazes were popular; and a peculiar feature of the largest gardens was a profusion of painted wooden heraldic devices on poles. A recreation of a Tudor garden may be seen at the Tudor House Museum in Southampton.

The relative prosperity of the late sixteenth century funded the building of many new manor houses, as well as the first generation of plant-collectors (see here). To the basic model of the Tudor garden the Elizabethans began to add more elaborate banqueting houses, topiary, grottoes and water features. They were also keen kitchen-gardeners, and the first guides to husbandry were published during this period.

Another 16th-century garden being watered with a hydraulic pump. Note the balustrading again, and the covered bee-skeps in the corner.

This princely layout of 1601 shows the extravagance of contemporary gardens, with arbours built on a monumental scale surrounding an elaborate fountain.

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY GARDENS

THE PROFLIGATE JACOBEAN court was responsible for the building of some extraordinary houses and gardens, including those at Hatfield in Hertfordshire and Blickling in Norfolk. This spending, combined with a period of relative peace in Europe, lured international designers to England. Two notable features – of the grandest sites at least – were a new ‘design unity’ of house and garden, inspired by Continental models, and the use of elaborate water features, such as fountains and even automata (moving statues powered by hydraulics). This period also saw the first botanic garden in England, created at Oxford in 1621. (There had been earlier examples in Italy, but the very earliest were probably the creation of the Arab world.)

The great seventeenth century avenues of Badminton, Gloucestershire, are a living map of ownership and power.

The English Civil Wars (1642–51) saw the destruction of many fine gardens, including the royal gardens at Wimbledon in London and Theobalds (pronounced ‘tibbalds’) in Hertfordshire – though the Puritans had their own interest in plants, and developed more productive kitchen gardens. Following his years of exile in France, the restoration of Charles II in 1660 brought a powerful renewal of French influence in gardens. His return coincided with that of the French royal gardener André Mollet (see here), who had designed gardens for Charles’s mother, Henrietta Maria, twenty years earlier. High fashion in gardens was driven by the court: the French style was inevitably modified by the accession of William of Orange in 1692, and by the Dutch fondness for sequences of square parterres (see pages here) set each side of a strong central axis. Outside court circles, however, change was more gradual, and houses belonging to the gentry usually retained their less regimented (though still formal) layouts of earlier years.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GARDENS

THE GREAT CHANGE in our gardens, as we have already noted, came with the eighteenth-century English landscape garden. This period witnessed a veritable explosion of garden-making, and its design features are difficult to summarize briefly, but they include planting that is informal and irregular, rather than formal and regular; the creation of (often large) irregularly shaped lakes, as opposed to geometric canals; the use of curved rather than straight lines; the destruction of walls and enclosures, and the opening up of views; the use of the ha-ha to unite gardens and parkland; large expanses of turf for riding, carriage-driving and grazing; the construction of eye-catching, iconographic garden buildings, such as temples and obelisks; and the creation of long, winding drives to pass all around the boundaries of the landscape. Capability Brown (see here) and his imitators were responsible for the transformation along these lines of literally thousands of English estates during the mid-eighteenth century. By the end of the century, however, a backlash of sorts was visible in the ‘picturesque’ preference for a more rugged landscape of ruins and rough trees.

The gardens at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, exemplify the 18th-century delight in informal landscaping as opposed to the linear and geometric gardens of the previous century.

Plas Newydd, Anglesey, was laid out in the late 18th century with advice from Humphrey Repton to make the most of its dramatically picturesque location.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY GARDENS

REGENCY GARDENERS DEVELOPED a new interest in the diversity of plant life, particularly flowers, reflected in the creation of the Royal Horticultural Society (1804). The energetic and eclectic Victorians for their part began to explore a range of garden styles, with no single model predominating. They were interested in garden history – not so much in an academic sense, as in a more carefree, pick-your-own fashion, which saw the widespread use of ‘Italianate’ and ‘French’ formal designs, ostensibly paying homage to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but with an unmistakable modern twist. Where the Victorians excelled was, of course, technology: greenhouses and hothouses were far larger, and far hotter, than ever before. This allowed the cultivation of many more exotic plants, which could be protected under glass through the English winter, then let loose with all their fiery colours in the summer. The bright massed ‘carpet beds’ that still adorn some public parks might be found in any Victorian garden that could afford the winter fuel and the great number of gardeners necessary to maintain them. By way of contrast, the Arts and Crafts movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was inspired by John Ruskin (1819–1900) and William Morris (1834–96) to encourage traditional craftsmanship and materials in houses and gardens. Broadly (though not exclusively) middle class, it revived the cottage garden and the cultivation of old-fashioned flowers.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY GARDENS

IT IS SCARCELY POSSIBLE to describe a single twentieth-century style in gardens. One of the most significant features of the period, however, was the loss of a great many large gardens. Three factors played an important part in their demise. First, agricultural depression at the start of the century meant that many country estates were no longer self-sufficient. Second, garden labour was both scarcer and more expensive (a consequence in part of World War I), so gardens were more expensive to maintain and there was less money to do so. Third, death duties (introduced in 1894) meant that landowners could no longer afford to pass property on to their children, so hundreds of country houses were sold or demolished and their gardens lost. The National Trust did step in to save some gardens (Hidcote is a notable example), and garden history acquired a new popularity. Garden design in the twentieth century was as eclectic as that in the preceding century: the early decades in particular saw some Anglo-Italian and Arts and Crafts masterpieces – Iford in Wiltshire, Hidcote, Sissinghurst and Hestercombe. In the later decades of the century, historic revivals and restorations increased dramatically in both number and accuracy; indeed, all four of the gardens just mentioned have been restored. Meanwhile, garden designers, like other artists, began to use an extraordinary variety of new materials: glass, steel, concrete, plastic and aluminium. But perhaps the greatest achievement of the century was to legitimize the small garden. For the first time authorities on gardening began to treat what happened in the everyday garden as having an interest all its own.

Levens, Cumbria, a late-17th-century garden restored in the historically conscious 19th century.

A 17th-century parterre de broderie, designed in the tradition established by André Mollet.

ENGLISH GARDEN DESIGNERS

PERHAPS WE SHOULD SAY rather ‘designers of gardens in England’, since the earliest celebrated ones were almost always foreign, and usually French. Below, in chronological order, are the most influential.

ANDRE MOLLET

THE FIRST TO LEAVE a mark of nationwide significance was André Mollet (died c. 1665), a designer with a pan-European clientele. He designed gardens for Charles I at St James’s Palace and at Wimbledon, before returning after the Restoration to create St James’s Park for Charles II. His work is marked by long avenues of trees (usually lime or elm), long canals (St James’s Park originally had a canal running its entire length), parterres de broderie (swirling designs of box set against a background of coloured sand or earth), and bosquets (groves of trees cut through by walks).

CHARLES BRIDGEMAN

ANOTHER ROYAL GARDENER, an Englishman this time, Charles Bridgeman (c. 1690–1738) came to prominence in the early eighteenth century. He was responsible for the Royal Parks, including Hampton Court, Windsor and Hyde Park, and Kensington Gardens, where he designed the Serpentine lake. But arguably his best work was reserved for private aristocratic clients – Lord Cobham at Stowe and the Duke of Newcastle at Claremont in Surrey. He inherited the formality of the seventeenth century, and began to develop the informality of the eighteenth: he planted straight avenues and square parterres, but extended the planting of wide lawns and irregular woodland, and was the first designer to make repeated use of the ha-ha to open up the landscape.

WILLIAM KENT

A FAILED ARTIST, William Kent (1685–1748) brilliantly transcended his mediocre painting skills to create gardens and landscapes of astonishing invention. He was ‘discovered’ in Rome by Lord Burlington, who brought Kent back to help with the gardens at Chiswick in west London. After the Prince of Wales asked Kent to design the gardens at Carlton House in The Mall, the Kentian style – based in part on the ideal landscapes painted by Claude and Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) – became the height of fashion. His achievement was to re-create the ideal landscape while making it appear the work of nature. He worked on relatively few gardens – they include Stowe and Holkham (Norfolk) – but his influence was enormous.

ABOUT THE BOOK