4.5 Value added
4.5.1 Gardens
4.5.2 Creative ecology
4.5.1 Gardens
The earliest gardens were very practical affairs. Plants were valued as food, as medicine and for their magical properties. The first step towards gardening was the gathering of useful plants from the wild in order to cultivate them in plots attached to dwellings.
There was almost certainly nothing that we, if we were transported backwards in time through the centuries, would have recognized as an ornamental garden until the Roman Empire's administrators imported the empire's architecture, building their villas around courtyards planted for pleasure as well as usefulness, with evergreen leaves and scented flowers around a pool or fountain. Their layout may well have influenced the cloistered, courtyard structure of early monasteries; and the fruit, vegetables, herbs and flowering plants imported to Britain by the Romans were given their only chance of survival by members of the religious orders in the relatively safe environment of monastic orchards and walled gardens.
Manorial households began to extend their outdoor territory. There was still a need for protection from the hostile world outside, and gardens were either walled or enclosed by impenetrable hedges or moats, some of which have survived in whole or in part. Within these enclosures were orchards and gardens of symmetrically laid out raised beds of herbs, vegetables and flowers. Medieval gardens, from the fourteenth century onwards, began to be used for pleasure and leisure for the first time. Illuminated manuscripts show ladies and their swains singing and playing lutes on flowery grass banks with a background of trellised fences and arched arbours planted with roses.
It is the buildings surrounding a later garden, like the fifteenth-century chapel and outbuildings at Sheldon Manor in Wiltshire, which conjure up a time when the poem The Romance of the Rose, which Chaucer translated from the French,.
Relative political stability, security and prosperity under the Tudor dynasty encouraged the rich and powerful to build increasingly magnificent houses with elaborate gardens to match. The beneficiaries of the Dissolution of the Monasteries used stone from the buildings that were destroyed to build substantial family houses. Sixteenth-century gardens were laid out in linked, symmetrical enclosures for orchards, herb and vegetable gardens, and knots of clipped hyssop, rue, thyme and santolina. The spaces within were filled with flowers, herbs or, in the case of the more elaborate designs, coloured gravel, crushed brick and coal dust. The knot patterns were designed to be seen from above, either from upper rooms m the house, from a raised walk or terrace, or from an artificial mount which frequently gave views of the surrounding countryside.
The art of topiary which had been fashionable in Roman times was revived, and a positive passion developed for clipping yew, box and other evergreen shrubs into ever more elaborate and fantastical shapes. A practice which continued until the eighteenth- century landscape movement swept away the zoos, chess sets and other eccentric topiary.
Landscape art
Much of the impetus of the landscape movement was supplied by the poet Alexander Pope whose Epistle to Burlington of 1731 advised, 'In all, let Nature never be forgot ... Consult the Genius of the Place/ He was also to a great extent responsible for the 'grottomania' which gripped makers of fashionable gardens despite the scorn of Dr Johnson who wrote 'A grotto is not often the wish or pleasure of an Englishman, who has more frequent need to solicit than to exclude the sun.' Grottoes and hermitages were part of the romantic Picturesque ideal, relating landscape gardening to literature and painting in a very direct way. At Corby Castle in Cumbria during the 1720s Lord Thomas Howard developed a part of Inglewood Forest which he thought resembled Milton's Eden in Paradise Lost. His achievement is described in 1734 by Sir John Clerk. There was, and still is 'A very agreeable winding walk down to the River where there are some artificial grotos ... and statues of the rural deities ... [and] a cascade 140 feet high.'
The hermit's cave at Bowood in Wiltshire is fossil-lined and, with the adjacent cascade which pours with great vigour over rugged moss-and fern-clad rocks, was designed in 1785 for the first Marquess of Lansdowne by Charles Hamilton, taking the scene from a painting by Poussin. The early nineteenth-century turretted flint folly at Houghton Lodge, Hampshire, the mock castle at Hagley Hall, Worcestershire and the general vogue for Gothic buildings such as Brown's bath house at Corsham Court are similarly inspired by the Picturesque ideal.

"To improve the scenery of a country, and to display its native beauties with advantage, is an art which originated in England, and has therefore been called English Gardening', yet as this expression is not sufficiently appropriate, especially since Gardening, in its more confined sense of Horticulture, has been likewise brought to the greatest perfection in this country, I have adopted the term Landscape Gardening, as most proper, because the art can only be advanced and perfected by the united powers of the landscape painter and the practical gardener. The former must conceive a plan, which the latter may be able to execute; for though the painter may represent a beautiful landscape on his canvas, and even surpass Nature by the combination of her choicest materials, yet the luxuriant imagination of the. painter must be subjected to the gardener's practical knowledge in planting, digging, and moving earth; that the simplest and readiest means of accomplishing each design may be suggested; since it is not by vast labour, or great expense, that Nature is generally to be improved."
Humphrey Repton; Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening, 1795


The landscapers had banished not only parterres, topiary and terraces from many houses, but also the productive parts of the garden. Fruit and vegetables were relegated to positions out of sight from the house, and sometimes a considerable distance from it. Many of the walled gardens which today provide rich soil and a sheltered environment for roses and other shrubs and climbing plants are a legacy from this period. Even at the time they were built, walled gardens would have been used to grow flowers for decoration in the house, but priority was given to providing vegetables and fruit for what were, in those days, large households of family, servants and guests. Advantage could be taken of sun-warmed south- and west- facing walls for grapes, figs and peaches. For growing tender plants and for over- wintering evergreens that were susceptible to frost, greenhouses had been in use since the end of the sixteenth century, and by the end of the eighteenth many were heated by hot air, steam or hot water.
Unlike other exotic fruit, oranges and lemons were not consigned to the kitchen gardens, but occupied handsome buildings in prominent positions.
Paradise gardens
From the beginning of the nineteenth century the ideal of the classical landscape composed from the three archetypal landscape elements of water, trees and stone (the latter fashioned into classical buildings, bridges and monuments) receded before a tide of enthusiasm for exotic plants.
Lancelot Brown died in 1783 and Humphry Rep ton in 1818. By then the insatiable quest for new garden plants had already begun, and with it a taste for botanizing, a hobby that was to become an almost compulsory accomplishment for every Victorian miss. As early as 1787 the first issue of the first gardening magazine was published: William Curtis's The Botanical Magazine, or, Flower Garden Displayed, in which the most ornamental foreign plants, cultivated in the open ground, the greenhouse and the stove, are accurately represented in their natural colours. It was a great success and encouraged various rival publications, including John Claudius London's influential The Gardener's Magazine, aimed at gardeners rather than land owners.
The plants described in these magazines and coveted by collectors were the hard- won booty of such brave and hardy explorers as David Douglas, whose expeditions to California were sponsored by the Royal Horticultural Society. He met his death in Hawaii in a pit dug to trap wild cattle, into which a bull had already fallen.
The Society "which sponsored Douglas was of great importance. In 1801 John Wedgwood, son of the potter Josiah and a keen amateur gardener, began a letter to William Forsyth (George Ill's gardener) with the words T have been turning my attention to the formation of a Horticultural Society.' From this beginning came the Royal Horticultural Society, still today the pre-eminent forum for the introduction of new plants at the Chelsea Flower Show and at its regular monthly shows.
Amateur patrons were able to play their part in the discovery of new plants through membership of the Society or, more directly, by arrangement with traders in the Amencas, in Asia and in China, or through friends and relations. Francis MoJesworth sent seeds from New Zealand to his brother Sir William who was forming a collection of conifers at Pencarrow in Cornwall and lined a mile-long drive with them. By 1854 he had specimens of all except ten of the conifers known to the Western world at that time.
The introduction of conifers, rhododendrons, azaleas, roses and the vast majority of the flowering shrubs that we grow today completely transformed the design of gardens. The display of plants was the first consideration, and separate plots began to be devoted to particular types of plants. In the 1840s Lord Somers planted a conifer collection at Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire, and pineta were planted at Scone Palace in Perthshire and at Bowood in Wiltshire. Collectors of Asiatic woodland shrubs had reason to be grateful to their tree-planting ancestors. For example, at Holker Hall in Cumbria, the oaks, beeches and sycamores planted by Sir Thomas Lowther in the eighteenth century provided the ideal environment for nineteenth-century plantings of azaleas, rhododendrons and magnolias.
The understanding that plants from abroad need an environment approaching that which they enjoy in their native habitat led to the construction of elaborate rockeries, water courses and, in some gardens, ferneries. In the eighteenth century rockwork, streams, cascades and grottoes had been constructed for their own sake, as examples of scenery that was 'picturesque', 'sublime' or 'horrid'. In the nineteenth century their purpose was to provide the right setting for newly introduced plants. At Pencarrow the massive granite rockery took three years to construct. Another early example of a rock garden can be seen at Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire, an almost vertical rock face imitating an alpine hillside. Sir Charles Isham, its creator, peopled it with what must have been the very first garden gnomes, the last of which is exhibited in the house.
Improvements in technology for building and heating glass-houses kept pace with the introduction of tender plants (which, until then, were housed in conservatories and orangeries), and provided for the nurture of the flowers and foliage that were used to make elaborate, often garishly colourful patterns of the carpet bedding so much loved by the Victorians. This is such a labour-intensive form of gardening that, although still much used by municipal parks departments, it is seldom seen in privately owned gardens.
The Victorian yearning for colourful flowers was matched by the return of a taste for formal pattern around the house, and a revival of terraces and parterres. A rash of 'Italian' gardens and 'Dutch' gardens sprang up to satisfy the taste, and architects and garden designers were employed to plan them. When one considers the numbers of staff required to maintain such elaborate gardens in immaculate condition, it is not surprising that those examples that remain have almost all been considerably simplified. At Ragley Hall, Warwickshire in 1870 sixteen gardeners were employed to look after the formal gardens that the present Lord Hertford's grandfather had restored. Today there are just three full time and one part time.
Prominent among the designers was William Nesfield (1793-1881), a former army officer, who specialized in patterns of box tracery on gravel beds.
From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards for six weeks in June and July the rose garden was the climax for scent and colour of many gardens. Forward leaps in hybridization coinciding with the vogue for formality led to the construction of symmetrically arranged patterns of rose beds, rose arbours, rose pergolas, pillars and swags. At Warwick Castle the rose garden designed by Robert Marnock in 1864 has been restored to Marnock's original plan, and gives a delightful impression of elegant structure and luxuriant planting. The fashion for giving roses a garden of their own has never died: of the gardens listed in this book, no less than seventy-nine have rose gardens.
Towards the turn of the century the nostalgia which married the Italian style of stone terraces and statuary to the Tudor style of knots and topiary was particularly well expressed by Robert Lonmer, the Scottish architect who laid out gardens at Earlshall Castle, Fife, at Lennoxlove, Lothian and at Torosay Castle on the Isle of Mull. Also to be seen in Scotland are the fine terraces devised in 1909 as a setting for Robert Adam's Mellerstain House in Berwickshire by Sir Reginald Blomfield. Advocating an architectural, formal approach to garden design, Blomfield's book The formal Garden in England (1892) was influential in upholding an alternative to the free 'natural' style championed by William Robinson. In England his design for Godinton Park in Kent survives.
Nostalgia for a bygone period of English history was expressed with a fervour that could perhaps only be felt by an American at Hever Castle in Kent. When Mr W W Astor fell in love with and bought the sixteenth-century home of the Boleyn family, his means fortunately matched his enthusiasm and, as well as restoring the castle and building a Tudor village alongside it, he created a series of gardens including a maze, topiary, a herb garden and Anne Boleyn's orchard. Set apart from these Tudor elements are gardens with other themes, including a spectacular Italian garden of statuary and Roman architectural fragments.
The vegetable garden and the flower garden represented two fundamentally opposed ways of using the soil. In the one, men used nature as a means of subsistence; its products were to be eaten. In the other, they sought to create order and aesthetic satisfaction and they showed a respect for the welfare of the species they cultivated. The contrast must not be overstated, for agriculture and vegetable-cultivation were not without their aesthetic dimensions.  But the new attitude to trees and flowers closely paralleled the more sentimental view of animals which was emerging during the same period.
Planting passions
'I think there are as many kinds of gardening as of poetry', wrote Joseph Addison in 1712.
Two hundred years later, this was certainly true. The formal style with its terraces, parterres, clipped hedges and topiary, the landscape style and the plantsman's style, designed to show off collections of woodland shrubs or alpine plants, were joined at the beginning of the twentieth century by two new, interrelated styles of great significance for the future of gardening: the natural style and the cottage garden style. From the Edwardian era until the present, these various kinds of gardening have flourished, often all being represented within the boundaries of one garden.
Two great gardeners were responsible for promoting the new garden philosophy by example in their work, and above all through their writing. William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll had nothing in common as far as their personalities and backgrounds were concerned, but they shared an appreciation of the natural beauty of wild plants and flowers, and of the luxuriance and artless charm with which the cottagers of English villages planted their gardens.
Their achievement was to persuade gardeners into a looser more natural planting style that was particularly suitable for the smaller country and suburban houses that were being built at that time.
Robinson's book The Wild Garden and many of his magazine articles advocated naturalistic planting in woodland and water gardens, and drew attention to the value of native flowering plants to be used among and beneath exotic shrubs and trees. His influence can be seen in the great woodland gardens created between the turn of the century and the First World War in the south of England, in Scotland and in other areas with the benefit of acid soil and native birch and oak woodland. In such conditions rhododendrons, azaleas, heaths and many of the other plants being introduced from Asia thrive.
Gertrude Jekyll shared Robinson's views about wild and woodland gardening, but perhaps her greatest contribution has been to the design of the herbaceous or mixed border. A painter by training, she worked out theories about colour in the garden, put her theories into practise in her own garden and in gardens designed for her clients, and expressed her ideas lucidly in her books. Their recent rediscovery has led to great improvements in many gardens, despite the fact that her planting plans were designed for gardens tended by a large, skilled labour force and therefore need thoughtful adaptation for use today.
Miss Jekyll's immensely fertile collaboration with Sir Edwin Eutyens led to the happy blend of the architecture of the garden with its planting. The style they arrived at together, of romantically luxuriant planting within a firm architectural framework of terraces and garden 'rooms', is still today the ideal towards which most gardeners strive.
The Second World War brought private ountry-house gardening to an end. Houses were requisitioned as military headquarters or as hospitals. Lawns and borders were ploughed up for food production. Almost without exception every major garden suffered involuntary neglect for a period of five years. By 1945 precious shrubs and young trees were suffocated under a tangle of brambles, nettles and elder. Sycamore and ash saplings sprang up everywhere, lodging themselves in the stonework of walls, steps and terraces and prizing apart the framework of glass- houses.
In post-war years there has been no question of returning to the prewar system.  It is no longer possible for owners to employ teams often or twelve gardeners .  Nevertheless, beautiful gardens have risen phoenix-like from bonfires of cleared scrub, nettles, bindweed and ground elder. This has come about through adaptation to changed circumstances: through making maximum use of increasingly efficient modern garden machines; through adapting the layout and planting of gardens to suit the machines; and through dedication and hard work by garden owners and their staffs.
Today, rather than creating special habitats for special groups of plants, gardeners choose plants that will thrive in the existing conditions.
The post-war rehabilitation of gardens still goes on after nearly fifty years, and an increased interest in garden history has led to the construction of gardens which relate to the architectural style of their houses.
In England working-class gardening was encouraged by land-shortage, social imitation and a developed sense of private property. Like pets and trees, gardens became a means of strengthening their owner's sense of identity and adding to his self-esteem. 'Most of the so-called love of flowers,' D. H. Lawrence would write, 'is merely this reaching out of possession and egoism: something I've got: something that embellishes me.)
The cultivation of flowers is an historical phenomenon of great importance to anyone concerned to know how the working classes would use their leisure and direct their emotional energies. It explains why large-scale tenements have seldom been built in England, for they would have deprived working men of the gardens which they regarded as a necessity; and it accounts for the growth of the allotment movement in the nineteenth century. The preoccupation with gardening, like that with pets, fishing and other hobbies, even helps to explain the relative lack of radical and political impulses among the British proletariat.  It is also important as an indication of that non-utilitarian attitude to the natural world
The greatest revolution in home, as opposed to estate, gardening has come from supermarket garden centres. These, aided and abetted by endlessTV garden make- over programmes, have taken the passion for planting to almost every urban garden, large and small.  Designer plants are now available for every condition a gardener could imagine.
Touching
Everything that could hum, or buzz, or sing, or bloom, had a part in my education - noisy-throated frogs, katydids and crickets held in my hand until, forgetting their embarrassment, they trilled their reedy note, little downy chickens and wildflowers, the dogwood blossoms, meadow-violets and budding fruit trees. I felt the bursting cotton- bolls and fingered their soft fibre and fuzzy seeds; I felt the low soughing of the wind through the cornstalks, the silky rustling of the long leaves, and the indignant snort of my pony, as we caught him in the pasture and put the bit in his mouth - ah me! how well I remember the spicy, clovery smell of his breath!
Sometimes I rose at dawn and stole into the garden while the heavy dew lay on the grass and flowers. Few know what joy it is to feel the roses pressing softly into the hand, or the beautiful motion of the lilies as they sway in the morning breeze. Sometimes I caught an insect in the flower I was plucking, and I felt the faint noise of a pair of wings rubbed together in a sudden terror, as the little creature became aware of a pressure from without.
Another favourite haunt of mine was the orchard, where the fruit ripened early in July. The large, downy peaches would reach themselves into my hand, and as the joyous breezes flew about the trees the apples tumbled at my feet. Oh, the delight with which I gathered up the fruit in my pinafore, pressed my face against the smooth cheeks of the apples, still warm from the sun, and skipped back to the house!
            from The Story of My Life HELEN KELLER
Place for weeds
Are you there? Can you hear?
Listen, try to understand,
O be still, become an ear,
For there is darkness on this land.
Stand and hearken, still as stone,
For I call to you alone.

Who can be what the weed was
In the empty afternoon?
Who can match me the wild grass,
Sighing its forgotten tune: Who is equal to that shell,
Whose spiral is my parable?

No human eye reflects the weed
Burning beneath the lonely sun:
The wild hard grass spangled with seed
Is still unmatched by anyone;
The justice of the shell is still
Above the mind, above the will.

Since love and beauty, blown upon,
Are not desired, not spoken of,
Hear me, you solitary one,
Better than beauty or than love,
Seen in the weed, the shell, the grass,
But never in my kind, alas!

The ragged weed is truth to me,
The poor grass honour, and the shell
Eternal justice, till I see
The spirit rive the roof of hell
With light enough to let me read
More than the grass, the shell, the weed.
                             Better than Love  RUTH Pitter
4.5.2 Creative ecology
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