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.