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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Gardening has always attracted devotedly literate practitioners; people who like to dig, it would appear, also like to write. And many of them write exceedingly well. Focusing on gardeners' words about the art of gardening, and ranging in time and place from Enlightenment France to modern-day New York, Writing the Garden brings together a diverse array of authors including Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Jekyll and Sir Roy Strong. For the most part they are not professional landscape designers or how-to horticulturalists, but rather hands-on gardeners who write with their own gardens in full view.
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Writing the Garden
A Literary Conversation Across Two Centuries
ELIZABETH BARLOW ROGERS
This book is dedicated to three great gardeners
Frank Cabot
Jack Lenor Larsen
Henriette Granville Suhr
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
From putting together the experiences of gardeners in different places, a conception of plants begins to form. Gardening, reading about gardening, and writing about gardening are all one; no one can garden alone.
– Elizabeth Lawrence, The Little Bulbs, 1957
THE GENESIS OF THIS book was an invitation from Mark Bartlett, Head Librarian of the New York Society Library, to co-curate with Harriet Shapiro, Head of Exhibitions, a display featuring the library’s trove of rare books by garden writers along with similar works from my own collection. An afternoon of delightful browsing with Harriet brought us to the same conclusion – that we should focus on a particular genre of garden writing within the larger realm of books on landscape subjects: books by and for actual gardeners. Moreover, these should be books whose literary quality ensured even a non-gardener’s reading pleasure.
It was difficult to leave on the shelf one of the library’s great treasures, the 1728 English edition of Dézallier d’Argenville’s The Theory and Practice of Gardening, but this treatise codifying the design style of Louis XIV’s royal gardener André Le Nôtre falls outside our selective purview. Mentioning it here, however, provides a clue to the riches of the New York Society Library. It is remarkable that books such as the Dézallier, which command high prices by rare book dealers when available today, are not recent acquisitions by the library, but rather were purchased not long after their original publication dates. Their status as rare books, therefore, is often a function of the long span of time they have been in the catalogue of more than three hundred thousand volumes that this venerable subscription library has amassed since its founding in 1754.
My own association with the New York Society Library began two centuries later, in 1964, the year I took up residence in the city. The Children’s Library was an obvious boon to me as the mother of a young child, but an even greater asset was revealed around four years later when I began to research my first book, The Forests and Wetlands of New York City (1971). I remember going into the stacks and finding Springs and Wells of Manhattan and the Bronx, New York City, at the End of the Nineteenth Century (1938) by James Reuel Smith, as well as other similarly obscure titles. Although, as a member of the library, I could have borrowed these books, it was pleasanter to sit at a writing table in the high-ceilinged, second-floor reading room making research notes on a yellow legal pad in the midst of engrossed book lovers on nearby sofas and chairs.
Probably because I am a native of San Antonio, the first rare book I purchased for myself was Frederick Law Olmsted’s A Journey through Texas; or A Saddle-trip on the Southwestern Frontier (1857). I felt bold that day in the late sixties when I stood at the counter of the Strand Bookstore writing a cheque for fifty dollars. Of course, I could have found this volume along with all of Olmsted’s other books in the New York Society Library, but establishing a tangible link with America’s first landscape architect was a catalytic event, prompting first the writing of Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York (Whitney Museum/Praeger, 1972) and then twenty years’ involvement in the restoration of Central Park.
Buying this bit of Olmstediana also planted a seed that remained dormant until the 1990s. By then I was embarked on tracing landscape history both backwards and forwards from Olmsted, gathering material and visiting parks and gardens in other countries in preparation for writing Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History (Abrams, 2001). Doing research in the rare-book rooms of libraries with collections that elucidate the history of landscape design with period images – Avery, Morgan, New York Public, Dumbarton Oaks, Harry Ransom Centre, Hunt Institute, and Huntington, to name the most prominent – was an eye-opening experience. How fascinating those beautifully illustrated books by Humphry Repton were with their hand-coloured flaps hiding and revealing before and after views! And what a thrill to hold an album containing prints of Versailles by Israel Silvestre or Nicolas and Adam Perelle! And turning the pages of the marvellous folios of engravings by Giovanni Battista Falda and Giovanni Francesco Venturini depicting the villas in and around Rome was almost as exciting as a trip to Italy.
Obtaining my own copy of Dézallier, which discusses and illustrates the French classical design idiom of Le Nôtre, was exciting enough to awaken the acquisitive streak that leads to the self-gratifying malady called collector’s passion. Like most collections, mine has a particular focus: it principally consists of treatises on landscape theory and practice, books of engravings of historic landscapes and narratives, such as Olmsted’s Journey, in which landscape description is a major theme. Some of these works are discussed in Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design (The Morgan Library & Museum in association with David R. Godine, Publisher, and the Foundation for Landscape Studies, 2010), and a number of them were on loan to the 2010 exhibition of the same title at the Morgan Library and Museum, for which I served as co-curator.
The books of mine discussed here in conjunction with ones belonging to the New York Society Library are a distinct subset within my overall collection. They were not acquired with any notion of collectability in mind but rather because I had succumbed to another passion: gardening. I can date the beginning of this phase of my life to a trip to England in 1974. It was to be the first of many subsequent trips to look at gardens and parks. My itinerary took me into Kent and Sussex counties south of London, to the Cotswolds and the West Country, and then back east through Oxford. En route I visited Gravetye Manor, Nymans, and Sheffield Park in Sussex; Sissinghurst in Kent; Stourhead near Salisbury; Hidcote Manor and Sezincote in the Cotswolds; Westbury Court and Kiftsgate Court in Gloucestershire; Knightshayes Court in Devon; Stowe in Buckinghamshire; and Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. I loved them all – the great eighteenth-century estate gardens of Stourhead and Blenheim, the Victorian splendour of Knightshayes, William Robinson’s counter-Victorian landscape at Gravetye, and probably most of all Major Lawrence Johnston’s Hidcote. It was in this garden that I experienced the epiphany that gardening is an art form like painting or architecture and that it was possible, with enough looking and learning, for a novice like me to make a garden myself.
Before that revelatory trip I grew marigolds, zinnias, lettuce, and tomatoes in the backyard of my weekend home in Wainscott on the South Fork of Long Island. Now I was overcome with a desire to grow old heritage roses with names like ‘Maiden’s Blush’ (or more erotically in French, ‘Cuisses de nymphe’, or ‘nymph’s thighs’). Catalogues from nurseries such as White Flower Farm in Connecticut, Wayside Gardens in Ohio (now in South Carolina), and Roses of Yesterday and Today in California began to arrive in the mail. I ordered bulbs from Holland – anemones, grape hyacinths, fritillarias, and scillas along with narcissuses, daffodils, and tulips. And I bought books not only about how to garden but books that friendly experts appeared to have written just for me, the amateur gardener. As I began to write this book and to select with Harriet the contents of the New York Society Library’s corresponding exhibition, I discovered that these old books I had acquired willy-nilly over the years fit exactly the genre we had chosen as our thematic focus.
The sharing across time and distance of gardening news, tips, information, observations, and opinions found here is paralleled by the collaborative nature of this book. As Elizabeth Lawrence, one of my favourite garden writers, observes in the epigraph above, ‘No one can garden alone.’ Certainly no author can produce a book such as this one without the skills of a good editor and talented designer, the commitment of a sympathetic publisher, and the generosity of financial supporters.
In my case, I must first acknowledge Julia Moore, an editor of art history books with whom I have had a long professional and personal friendship. I am most appreciative of Julia’s attention to this essay’s overall structure and narrative flow as well as her sound suggestions wherever she encountered infelicities of phrasing, a task that was augmented by copy-editor Margaret Oppenheimer. Harriet Shapiro provided a good editorial sounding board. I am grateful for her discovery of certain volumes in the New York Society Library that I might not have found on my own, as well as her first-reader’s suggestions regarding improvements to the text. Brandi Tambasco of the Library also contributed her valuable editorial skills. In addition, I am indebted to Judith B. Tankard, landscape historian and author of Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement (2004), Beatrix Farrand: Private Gardens, Public Landscapes (2009), and Gertrude Jekyll and the Country House Garden (2011), for her helpful editorial comments and manuscript corrections.
A further debt of gratitude is owed David Godine, a paragon within a dying breed, the independent book publisher. A true bibliophile schooled in the craft of letterpress printing, David involves himself in all aspects of his books’ production. In this case we were immensely advantaged by having Jerry Kelly as the book’s designer. Jerry is a calligrapher as well as a teacher of graphic design, and his skill is apparent in the layout, typeface, paper quality, cover, and other creative decisions that account for the book’s handsome appearance.
The sponsors of the publication of Writing the Garden are the New York Society Library and the Foundation for Landscape Studies. Their underwriting of editorial, photographic, design, and other necessary expenses constitute a subvention without which it would have been prohibitive to publish the book in its present form. I am therefore grateful to Michael and Evelyn Jefcoat, longtime supporters of the Foundation for Landscape Studies, Frederic Rich, chairman, and the other board members for voting to underwrite a portion of these publication costs.
I offer thanks as well to Charles Berry, chairman, and the members of the board of the New York Society Library and to Mark Bartlett, head librarian, for encouraging me to bring together this array of garden writers from past generations along with those of our own time. Inevitably there are some fine garden writers missing from these pages. I hope that readers will discover them too, and that meeting the ones they will find here engaged in a timeless dialogue will make them want to read their books in their entirety.
ELIZABETH BARLOW ROGERS
NEW YORK CITY
2011
INTRODUCTION
IN THE SAME WAY that you don’t have to be a baseball fan to enjoy a good description of a Yankees-Red Sox game by a sportswriter like Roger Angell or to be a chef to savour the spice in the books of a food writer like M. F. K. Fisher, you don’t have to be a gardener to appreciate the knowledge, enthusiasm, and wit with which certain garden writers achieve a creative and fruitful liaison between words and nature. The garden writers I have in mind are not the professional landscape designers whose theories, ideas, and examples provide inspiration to garden-makers or the horticulturists and botanists whose works form the practical gardener’s basic reference tools. Rather, they are the ones whose own gardens are usually in full view as they write.
This does not mean that there is not a great deal of important information and sound instruction being conveyed in this genre of garden writing – only that it is being delivered in informal, engaging, and sometimes droll literary prose. Typically, authors in this category write in the first person. This conversational style presumes a certain comradeship with the reader. Some come across as friendly tutors. Others create personae that make their words sound like neighbourly nattering, gardener to gardener. Then there is the shriller voice of the polemicist with decided views on the proper approach to making gardens. In addition, there are the ruminations of the philosopher who finds the garden filled with metaphorical meaning.
I would say that all of the books of this genre are premised on passion. They constitute a love affair between the gardener and the garden. Although horticultural love affairs are often tumultuous (nature can be frustratingly fickle, and in dealing with weather, pests, and other adversities, some garden writers assume a comically beleaguered persona), the authors of these books are lovers of place, the space in nature the writer-gardener claims as home ground, an arena for individual creative expression. Naturally, the volumes we are about to discuss display varieties of tone, style, and intent. What unites them is their status as classics – books about gardens and gardening that we can read and reread simply for pleasure.
One could question the fact that, with the exception of Rousseau and Karel Čapek, a Czech, we are dealing here with anglophone writers. I believe that is so because the origin of this particular genre of garden literature is essentially a British innovation. Beginning with Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Lord Burlington, which exhorts the garden-maker to ‘consult the Genius of the Place in all’, the primacy of the English garden as a particular style of landscape design was established. Its alliance with the rural countryside laid the foundation for the Picturesque, and with the rise of Romanticism as an international movement, the jardin anglais became a kind of national export. Further, it is reasonable to suggest that a preponderance of garden writing was British because of the simple fact that landscape gardening and literature are this island nation’s two principal art forms. Therefore one finds the garden serving as a setting in many English novels and providing the theme of many English poems.
As American gardening came of age in the nineteenth century, it was obviously to England that gardeners and landscape designers looked for advice, drawing on the works of J. C. Loudon and his wife Jane, proponents of the Gardenesque style, with its emphasis on horticultural display. Both Loudon and Andrew Jackson Downing, his American counterpart, edited gardening magazines as a means of communicating new botanical knowledge, garden-design theory, and horticultural information. As Gertrude Jekyll and other English garden-makers brought the genre of literature we are examining here to full flower at the turn of the twentieth century, it was natural that their American cousins would follow suit.
Differences in climate, history, and national ethos, however, account for divergent expressions between the two countries both in gardens and words. In Victorian England, sustained by a profession of trained head gardeners and their staffs, the Gardenesque style of specimen display enjoyed a longer period of fashion than in America. The subsequent Arts and Crafts movement helped foster a garden style that I like to think of as ‘Englishness Cherished’. It is one where the mellow stone walls of ancient manor houses are married with seemingly casual floral compositions in which many of the plants once found in humble cottage gardens blend with rarer horticultural specimens. This is a place-specific kind of garden making. Estate-defined, it often enjoys a Picturesque alliance with the surrounding rural landscape, yet its fundamental design principle is one of enclosure. In America, however, as might be expected in a land of continental dimensions in which notions of wilderness and scenic grandeur have traditionally challenged the national imagination, the designers of the nineteenth-century villas in the Hudson River Valley and the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Country Place Era houses in the Berkshires were able to incorporate into their garden landscapes views of the more awesome scenery associated with the Romantic Sublime.
The present volume is, as the title suggests, a ‘literary conversation’ for which I have provided the descriptive context for the voices of writers whose words appear along with mine. Garden writing flourishes today as vigorously as ever, and with so many wonderful books of this kind still being published, I do not feel that there should be an arbitrary cut-off date. Rather, I wish to set up a virtual colloquium that brings together garden writers from the end of the eighteenth century to the present.
Since even within a particular genre authors write from different perspectives and for diverse audiences, I have placed the garden writers we are about to meet within categories. There are those who write articles for magazines or columns for newspapers, which are sometimes collected and published in book form. These authors, along with the inveterate letter writers who thrive on horticultural fellowship with one another – often one and the same since garden columnists invariably receive mail from their readers – I call correspondents.
Other authors adopt the role of tutor, giving advice based on their own gardening experience and visits to other gardens. I have labelled them teachers. We also have here those whose random enthusiasms or strong opinions sound like the congenial musing or lively harangue you might hear over drinks. I have classified these writers as conversationalists.
Irony is a great literary virtue, and the gardener’s foibles in the face of indifferent nature are the stuff of comedy. We therefore have a category of humourists. Then there are writers for whom the garden provides metaphors for subjects beyond botany, horticulture, and landscape design. I think of them as philosophers.
We meet women who broke the barrier of the spade; spouses who cooperated or quarrelled; nurserymen who blurred the boundary between disinterested advice and business promotion; foragers who tell of their adventures digging plants for their gardens in the wild; warriors who filled their pens with vitriol in order to acidly disagree with one another; rhapsodists who never met a flower they didn’t love tenderly; and travellers who write about the gardens of foreign lands. But, of course, teachers travel, travellers teach, philosophers can be humourous, humourists can philosophise, and so on. Therefore the reader should feel free to transpose these authors from one category to another as they see fit.
Transecting all our garden-writer categories are certain universal themes. Several of our authors tell us how their love of gardening sprang from a seed planted in childhood. The gardening mother or grandfather and the advantages of growing up surrounded by nature and horticulture were for them formative. These autobiographical fragments help round out our sense of their backgrounds, characters, and personalities, as well as their predilection for certain kinds of gardens.
Another theme that you will find sounded throughout is the importance of good soil. True gardeners always start in the most literal sense from the ground up. In their case ‘digging in the dirt’ is much more than a metaphor. Soil is the fundamental medium of their art, and their close attention to its quality is a leitmotif that runs throughout our present survey. For them nothing is sweeter than the smell of freshly turned soil. More than any herbal fragrance, this is the most intoxicating garden aroma of all. Rightly, they give fundamental importance to knowing the degree to which their soil is composed of clay, sand, and silt and what its chemical composition is. To garden successfully, you, like they, must calculate your horticultural possibilities in terms of which plants will thrive in what kinds of soil. Read carefully what they have to say about soil when you are still a gardening neophyte; you will be grateful that they felt compelled to pass on this valuable information.
As a corollary requirement, competent gardeners need to understand the climate of the region in which they garden and have a keen grasp of those plants that will thrive and those that cannot be planted at all. Related to this is a knowledge of the seasonal nature of gardening and which plants can be expected to appear to best advantage at various stages of the growing season. For this reason, you will note that many of the books under discussion have chapters titled according to the months of the year.
The Garden of Eden may have been the only garden not to have had aphids, scale insects, moth larvae, mealybugs, spider mites, cabbage worms, and a host of other unwelcome guests – including the slug, a slimy, shell-less mollusc. This nocturnal predator can ravage foliage and kill plants faster than they can grow. The slug is a universal scourge, the bane of gardeners everywhere, and a subject discussed with unqualified repugnance and unbridled ire by several authors we encounter in these pages.
Sensory delight, on the other hand, emerges as a happier recurring theme. There is a physicality to gardening, and we should take note of the tactile satisfaction dedicated gardeners find in good, friable soil running through their fingers; their joy in the pungent aroma of rich compost or decaying autumn leaves on a woodland path; the bliss they derive from the smell of various flowers in bloom; the aesthetic enjoyment they receive from tree form, plant texture, and flower structure, as well as the colours of bark, leaf, and blossom; the nostalgia they experience in remembering the taste of honeysuckle nectar when they were children.
Curiosity is a long suit among the garden writers we are considering. They are readers and researchers avid for botanical lore, horticultural history, and the etymology of plant names. They are steeped in the works of ancient and Elizabethan herbalists – Dioscorides, Pliny, Gerard – as well as Linnaeus and other pioneering botanists and plant hunters in the Age of Enlightenment. Because of the fact that self-taught amateur gardeners like to seek and share information and ideas and are quite naturally readers of one another, a large literary commonwealth of garden writers has developed during the past two and a half centuries. This is a situation that is hospitable to a personal and individualistic form of writing that presumes, as we shall soon see, a certain friendly intimacy between author and reader.
WOMEN IN THE GARDEN
FOR MORE THAN A century presumptions regarding the gardener’s sexual identity have slowly undergone a sea change as perceptions about women gardeners have shifted from the commonly held belief of their being too delicate for dirt to the qualified notion of gardening as a suitable female occupation to their full admission as members of a now gender-irrelevant profession. Jumping the garden fence of Victorian values was a hurdle forward-thinking persons once had to encourage them to attempt. Later, a love of flowers and knowledge of plant form, colour, and seasonal growth patterns opened the garden gate to a growing body of women who saw gardening as an art form. Gaining the same horticultural training and design skills as men, women at last were considered experts in the garden, putting them on an equal footing with their male peers. Throughout this long journey, ink from the pens of women garden writers never ceased to flow.
JANE LOUDON
I would categorise Jane Loudon (1807–1858) as a pioneer on behalf of women gardeners as well as a botanical and horticultural educator of the first rank. Mrs Loudon (she is thus referred to on the title pages of her books) was the wife of the Scottish botanist John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843), author of An Encyclopedia of Gardening; Comprising the Theory and Practice of Horticulture, Floriculture, Arboriculture, and Landscape-Gardening (1822). J. C. Loudon furthered the nineteenth-century marriage of industrial technology and horticulture with the invention of the hinged sash bar that made possible the construction of conservatories and glasshouses for the protection and propagation of the tender exotic plants pouring into England from the four corners of the world. He is best known as the originator of what is called the Gardenesque style, based on the arrangement of plants in a manner intended to display their characteristics as individual specimens.
‘A Lady’s gauntlet of strong leather, invented by Miss Perry of Stroud, near Hazlemere.’ Gardening for Ladies; and Companion to the Ladies’ Flower-Garden by Mrs. Loudon, 1860.
A pioneer of science fiction like Mary Shelley, as Jane Webb (her maiden name), she anonymously published The Mummy! Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827). Because of her descriptions of the kind of futuristic technological inventions that fascinated him, Loudon discovered the author’s identity and arranged a meeting. After their marriage she served as her husband’s amanuensis for the production of the rest of his herculean literary output, including the magisterial Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum (1838). Remarkably, she found time to become a botanical and horticultural writer herself. In Instructions in Gardening for Ladies (1840) and The Ladies’ Companion to the Flower Garden (1841), she gently nudged her purportedly delicate female contemporaries to take up the spade and trowel and to dig and plant as a source of healthy exercise and self-fulfillment. Since the ladies to whom her words are addressed were so unaccustomed to manual labour of this sort, she felt compelled to explain that ‘The first point to be attended to, in order to render the operation of digging less laborious, is to provide a suitable spade; that is, one which shall be as light as is consistent with strength, and which will penetrate the ground with the least possible trouble.’ In that era of normative female attire, it was necessary as well to suggest the appropriate costume for a lady gardener: ‘a pair of clogs … to put over her shoes; or if she should dislike these, and prefer strong shoes, she should be provided with what gardeners call a tramp … She should also have a pair of stiff thick leathern gloves, or gauntlets, to protect her hands …’
I particularly treasure my copy of Mrs Loudon’s My Own Garden; or The Young Gardener’s Year Book (1855), a charming, small volume illustrated with exquisite hand-coloured engravings depicting flowers of the four seasons. Her magnum opus, The Ladies’ Flower-Garden (c. 1855–59), a five-volume botanical masterpiece, is much more than a book for women gardeners or children. Indeed, with its three hundred chromolithograph plates and detailed descriptions of more than a thousand species in various categories – bulbs, annuals, perennials, greenhouse plants, wildflowers – it ranks as one of the most beautiful, useful, and readable botanical encyclopedias of all time. The fact that Jane Loudon’s Christian name was never used in ascribing the authorship of this or her other books, and that her principle role was that of her husband’s amanuensis, should not obscure the fact that his star pupil was his peer in terms of horticultural and botanical knowledge and literary productivity. Accompanying every plate depicting related individuals of a particular flower species are comprehensive accounts of each one’s appearance, botanical structure, growth habit, native origin, medicinal and other uses, and horticultural requirements. When I once saw a set of these sumptuous volumes in the library at Garland Farm in Bar Harbour, Maine, the final home of the pioneering landscape garden designer Beatrix Farrand, I realised that, unlike some other books containing exquisite botanical illustrations, The Ladies’ Flower-Garden could be a useful reference tool for professional as well as amateur gardeners, an observation that still holds true today.
‘Papaver orientale. Oriental Poppy.’ The Ladies’ Flower-Garden of Ornamental Perennials by Mrs Loudon, 1843.
‘Tigrida pavonia. Common Tiger Flower.’ The Ladies’ Flower-Garden of Ornamental Bulbous Plants by Mrs Loudon, 1841.
FRANCES GARNET, VISCOUNTESS WOLSELEY
Half a century later, as Victorian attitudes towards woman’s place were beginning to relax, Frances Garnet, 2nd Viscountess Wolseley (1872–1936), could go one step further than Jane Loudon in terms of encouraging women to become gardeners. In 1902 she founded the College for Lady Gardeners in Glynde, Sussex, a school to educate female students to do the same kind of horticultural labour – digging beds, preparing the soil, planting, weeding, watering, harvesting – that was the traditional domain of men. In opening the door of the previously all-male world of horticultural employment to women, she was well ahead of her time. (It was not until 1932 when Beatrix Havergal started the Waterperry School of Horticulture that a handful of women followed the founder in achieving recognition by the prestigious Royal Horticultural Society.)
When Wolseley wrote In a College Garden (1916), the world around her was rapidly changing. World War I had brought to a close the period when house guests strolled along gravel paths set between wide planting beds bordered by clipped hedges and tea was carried by servants across verdant lawns to people lounging in wicker chairs in the shade of ancient trees. Sounding very much like the headmistress she had been before turning the operation of her college over to a former student who ran it according to the strict principles she had established, she reflected on her creation of ’a garden complete enough to afford ample preparation to those women who wish to make a livelihood by gardening.’
Portrait of Viscountess Wolseley. Frontispiece and title page In a College Garden by Viscountess Wolseley, 1916.
Like Mrs Jane Loudon, Viscountess Wolseley felt it necessary to attire the female gardener ‘in the way of dress which is neat and yet essentially becoming and feminine.’ She believed that the student uniform should be simple, practical, and tidy, describing it thus:
It consists of coat and skirt, khaki in colour, because the earth here, having so much lime in it, is light-coloured, and therefore does not show upon drab-coloured cloth. Over this when busy [the students] wear a Hessian canvas apron containing roomy pockets for knife, raffia, tarred twine, and many other requisites that a gardener has constant need of. The skirts are what are called ‘Aviation’ ones, and are cut so that in windy weather, although they are short, they always cling neatly to the figure. Brown boots and leggings are below, and students are thus able to walk in and out of rows of cabbages or other vegetables and plants on a rainy day without having that heavy, wet, and tiring drag which is the drawback of an ordinary skirt … A white shirt and brown felt soft-rimmed hat complete the uniform, so that only touches of colour come from the hat and silk sailor tie, and both these are red, white, and blue, which are the colours of the College.
In a College Garden can be considered a professional memoir, whereas Wolseley’s Gardens: Their Form and Design (1919) is aimed at advising a new generation of small-property owners on the art of garden making. Covering all manner of subjects – entrances, formal flower beds, garden ornament, hedge-enclosed garden rooms, kitchen gardens, rock gardens, topiary, treillage – it is a clear expression of the Arts and Crafts style of garden design, a blending of architectural form, historical tradition, and sophisticated floriculture.
GERTRUDE JEKYLL
The doyenne and, to a large degree, the inventor of this type of garden, Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932) thought of the garden as would a painter. For her, gardening was horticultural picture making. ‘Picture making’ is the right term. Over and over in books such as Wood and Garden (1899), Jekyll paints verbal pictures as she takes us on a series of walks through her garden, Munstead Wood. Moving from one picture to the next through her gallery of garden scenes, she points out those of special interest during a particular month of the year, while at the same time attuning our senses to seasonal sounds and odours.
For Jekyll, nature is the gardener’s best guide. There are also lessons to be learnt from ‘the little cottage gardens that help make our English waysides the prettiest in the temperate world.’ With epigrammatic succinctness she sums up perhaps better than anyone the deep satisfaction to be had from the physical enterprise of gardening. For her the purpose of such activity was to give ‘happiness and repose of mind, firstly and above all considerations, and to give it through the presentation of the best kind of pictorial beauty of flower and foliage that can be combined or invented.’
Fortunate is the gardener who has always lived in a garden, and lucky is the child who is given a plot to garden when still quite young. Jekyll’s charming book Children and Gardens (1908) begins on an autobiographical note: ‘Well do I remember the time when I thought there were two kinds of people in the world – children and grown-ups, and that the world really belonged to the children. And I think it is because I have been more or less a gardener all my life that I still feel like a child in many ways, although from the number of years I have lived I ought to know that I am quite an old woman.’
Drawing on her own experiences as a child, Jekyll segues from vivid recollections of her first gardening endeavours and her attraction to specific scenes of nature’s beauty found on youthful rambles to this kind of careful instruction:
I said I would tell you about plans. A plan is a map of a small space on a large scale – you will see what scale means presently. The plan shows what it represents as if you were looking at it from above. If you lie on a table on your stomach and look over the edge, and if exactly below your eyes there is a dinner-plate on the floor, you see the plate in plan.
Thus is the young gardener taught how to lay out a garden; in similar grandmotherly age-to-youth language, using her own diagrammatic sketches, she makes the rest of the ABCs of creating a garden and growing plants easy for a child to grasp.
For Jekyll, gardening is essentially an aesthetic enterprise. While she believed that acquiring knowledge of the qualities of various types of soil and mastering horticultural methods is an important part of the gardener’s education, she stressed the importance of training oneself to have ‘a good flower-eye’. Light plays an important role, as does seasonality, in the making of Jekyll’s garden pictures. And colour and growing habit are all-important considerations. Here, for instance, is how she describes her half-acre plantation of azaleas: ‘The whites are planted at the lower and more shady end of the group; next come the yellows and pale pinks, and these are followed at a little distance by kinds whose flowers are of orange, copper, flame, and scarlet-crimson colourings; this strong-coloured group again softening off into the woodland by bushes of the common yellow Azalea pontica, and its variety with flowers of larger size and deeper colour.’
Dorothea and Dinah at Orchards. Children and Gardens by Gertrude Jekyll, 1908
‘Plan for the Hidden Garden’. Colour in the Flower Garden, by Gertrude Jekyll, 1908.
It is thus not surprising to learn that Jekyll was a painter before poor eyesight caused her to exchange her palette of pigments for one of plants. In Colour in the Flower Garden (1908) she continues to paint garden pictures with the same kind of compositional forethought as an artist who first sketches the outlines of a new work on canvas. To explain her design method, Jekyll illustrates the book with diagrams for various beds and borders. The originator of colour themes, she depicts plans for a gold garden, an orange garden, a grey garden, a blue garden, and a green garden. In addition, she inserts between some of the pages foldout plans for other gardens at Munstead Wood, including her long main border, the September border of early Michaelmas daisies, the June iris border, and her hidden garden. Studying these we perceive how, in order to achieve a tapestry-like weave of tone and texture, her flower schemes appear as loosely sketched, overlapping diagonal drifts. This approach to gardening is, of course, the antithesis of that of the Victorian gardeners who created precisely edged beds displaying showy annuals in patterned arrangements.
Above all, it is movement through the garden, the alternation of scenes from sunny lawn to shady woodland, that makes Munstead Wood such a delightful sensory experience. Here is how we begin our walk in her woodland garden:
My house, a big cottage, stands facing a little to the east of south, just below the wood. The windows of the sitting-room and its outer door, which stands open in all fine summer weather, look up a straight wide grassy way, the vista being ended by a fine old Scotch Fir with a background of dark wood. This old Fir and one other, and a number in and near the southern hedge, are all that remain of the older wood which was Scotch Fir.
This green wood walk, being the widest and most important, is treated more boldly than the others – with groups of Rhododendrons in the region rather near the house, and for the rest only a biggish patch of the two North American Brambles, the white-flowered Rubus nutkanus, and the rosy R. odoratus. In spring the western region of tall Spanish Chestnuts, which begins just beyond the Rhododendrons, is carpeted with Poets’ Narcissus; the note of tender white blossom being taken up and repeated by the bloom-clouds of Amelanchier, that charming little woodland flowering tree whose use in such ways is so much neglected. Close to the ground in the distance the light comes with brilliant effect through the young leaves of a wide-spread carpet of Lily of the Valley, whose clusters of sweet little white bells will be a delight a month hence.
The Rhododendrons are carefully grouped for colour – pink, white, rose and red of the best qualities are in the sunniest part, while, kept well apart from them, near the tall chestnuts and rejoicing in their partial shade, are the purple colourings, of as pure and cool a purple as may be found among carefully selected ponticum seedlings and the few named kinds that associate well with them …
Jekyll goes on to tell us how among the rhododendrons she has planted strong groups of Lilium auratum to ‘give a new picture of flower-beauty in the late summer and autumn.’ She says that she has taken pains to make the garden melt imperceptibly into the wood. Once you have entered it, a series of paths diverging from the main grassy way call for different combinations of shade-loving trees, shrubs, and ground covers. As she invites us to accompany her on the fern walk, she wants us to understand that this is no wildwood but rather one that is simply a naturalistic part of the garden proper:
Just as wild gardening should never look like garden gardening, or, as it so sadly often does, like garden plants gone astray and quite out of place, so wood paths should never look like garden paths. There must be no hard edges, no conscious boundaries. The wood path is merely an easy way that the eye just perceives and the foot follows. It dies away imperceptibly on either side into the floor of the wood and is of exactly the same nature, only that it is smooth and easy and is not encumbered by projecting tree-roots, Bracken or Bramble, these being all removed when the path is made.
Penetrating deeper into the wood we find ourselves among oaks and birches.
