14 minute read
Two reviews, illustrated, to show, by actual examples from British gardens, that clipping and aligning trees to make them 'harmonise' with architecture is barbarous, needless, and inartistic by W. Robinson, F.L.S. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street 1892 To Sir Philip Currie, K.C.B....
4 minute read
That we might see, eyes were given us; and a tongue to tell accurately what we had got to see. It is the alpha and omega of all intellect that man has. No poetry, hardly even that of Goethe, is equal to the true image of reality—had one eyes to see that.— T. Carlyle , Letters to Varnhagen Von Ense . The one English thing that has touched the heart of the world is the English garden. Proof of this we have in such noble gardens as the English park at Munich, the garden of the Emperor of Austria at Laxenberg, the Petit Trianon at Versailles, the parks formed of recent years round Paris, and many lovely gardens in Europe and America. The good sense of English writers and landscape gardeners refused to accept as right or reasonable the architect's garden, a thing set out as bricks and stones are,...
2 minute read
A beautiful house in a fair landscape is the most delightful scene of the cultivated earth—all the more so if there be an artistic garden—the rarest thing to find! The union—a happy marriage it should be—between the house beautiful and the ground near it is worthy of more thought than it has had in the past, and the best ways of effecting that union artistically should interest men more and more as our cities grow larger and our lovely English landscape shrinks back from them. The views of old writers will help us little, for a wholly different state of things has arisen in these mechanical days. My own view is that we have never yet got from the garden, and, above all, the home landscape, half the beauty which we may get by abolishing the needless formality and geometry which disfigure so many gardens, both as regards plan and...
2 minute read
After we have settled the essential approaches, levels, and enclosures for shelter, privacy, or dividing lines around a house, the natural form or lines of the earth herself are in nearly all cases the best to follow, and in my work I face any labour to get the ground back into its natural level or fall where disfigured by ugly banks, lines, or angles. In the true Italian garden on the hills we have to alter the natural line of the earth or "terrace" it, because we cannot otherwise cultivate the ground or move at ease upon it. Such steep ground exists in many countries, and where it does, a like plan must be followed. The strictly formal in such ground is as right in its way as the lawn in a garden in the Thames valley. But the lawn is the heart of the true English garden, and as...
3 minute read
Such views I have urged, and carry them out when I can, in the hope of bringing gardening into a line with art, from which it is now so often divorced. It is natural that these views should meet with some opposition, and the consideration of the Formal Garden gives the opportunity of examining their value. The question, briefly stated, is this: Are we, in laying out our gardens, to ignore the house, and to reproduce uncultivated Nature to the best of our ability in the garden? Or are we to treat the house and garden as inseparable factors in one homogeneous whole, which are to co-operate for one premeditated result? No sane person has ever proposed to ignore the house. So far from ignoring the house in my own work, where there is a beautiful house it tells me what to do! Unhappily, the house is often so bad...
1 minute read
Mr. Blomfield writes nonsense, and then attributes it to me— that is to say, we go to Claude, and having saturated our minds with his rocks and trees, we return to Nature and try to worry her into a resemblance to Claude. I am never concerned with Claude, but seek the best expression I can secure of our beautiful English real landscapes, which are far finer than Claude's. At least I never saw any painted landscape like them—say that from the Chestnut Walk at Shrubland, looking over the lovely Suffolk country. That is the precious heritage we have to keep. And that is where simple and picturesque gardening will help us by making the garden a beautiful foreground for the true landscape, instead of cutting it off with a "high wall" or anything else that is ugly and needless. The lawns are not to be left in broad expanse, but...
2 minute read
The place of formal gardening is clear for ever. The architect can help the gardener much by building a beautiful house! That is his work. The true architect, it seems to me, would seek to go no farther. The better the real work of the architect is done, the better for the garden and landscape. If there are any difficulties of level about the house beautiful, they should be dealt with by the architect, and the better his work and the necessary terracing, if any, are done, the pleasanter the work of the landscape or other gardener who has to follow him should be. That a garden is made for plants is what most people who care for gardens suppose. If a garden has any use, it is to treasure for us beautiful flowers, shrubs, and trees. In these days—when our ways of building are the laughing-stock of all who...
1 minute read
Not one word of the swift worker, Time! Its effect on gardens is one of the first considerations. Fortress-town, castle, and moat all without further use! In old days gardens had to be set within the walls; hence, formal in outline, though often charming inside. To keep all that remains of such should be our first care; never to imitate them now! Many old gardens of this sort that remain to us are far more beautiful than the modern formal gardening, which by a strange perversity has been kept naked of plants or flower life! When safety came from civil war, then came to us the often beautiful Eliza bethan house, free of all moat or trace of war. At one time it was rash to make a garden away from the protecting walls. Now, any day in a country place beautiful situations may be found for certain kinds of...
1 minute read
It is surely flying in the face of Nature to fill our gardens with tropical plants, as we are urged to do by the writers on landscape gardening, ignoring the entire difference of climate and the fact that a colour which may look superb in the midst of other strong colours will look gaudy and vulgar amongst our sober tints, and that a leaf like that of the Yucca, which may be all very well in its own country, is out of scale and character amidst the modest foliage of our English trees. ( The Formal Garden. ) A passage full of nonsense! The true use and first reason of a garden is to keep and grow for us plants not in our woods and mostly from other countries than our own! The Yucca, we are told by the authors, is a "plant out of scale and character among the...
4 minute read
The very name of the book is a mistake. "Formal gardening" is rightly applied only to the gardens in which both the design and planting were formal and stupidly formal like the upper terrace of the Crystal Palace, Kensington Gore, as laid out by Nesfield, Crewe Hall; and Shrubland, as laid out by Barry, in which, as in others of these architects' gardens, strict orders were given that no plants were to be allowed on the walls. The architect was so proud of his design, that he did not want the gardener at all, except to pound up bricks to take the place of flower colour! It may be necessary to explain to some that this pounded brick and tile in lieu of colours has frequently been laid down in flower-gardens in our own day. To old gardens like Haddon and Rockingham, in which the vegetation about the house is...
2 minute read
As to a natural school of landscape gardening, the authors say: A great deal is said about Nature and her beauty, and fidelity to Nature, and so on; but as the landscape gardener never takes the trouble to state precisely what he means by Nature, and, indeed, prefers to use the word in half a dozen different senses, we are not very much the wiser so far as principles are concerned. They make this statement as if all beautiful natural landscape were a closed book; as if there were no stately Yews, in natural forms, on the Merrow Downs, as well as clipped Yews at Elvaston; as if the tree-fringed mountain lawns of Switzerland did not exist; or lovely evergreen glades on the Californian mountains, or wild Azalea gardens on those of Carolina, or even naturally-grown Planes in London squares. There are many gardens and parks which clearly show what...
3 minute read
For instance, because Nature is assumed never to show straight lines, all paths are to be made crooked; because in a virgin forest there are no paths at all, let us in our acre and a half of garden make as little of the paths as possible. Deception is a primary object of the landscape gardener. ( The Formal Garden. ) This, too, in the face of the facts of the case, of proof ready for the authors, in gardens in every country, from Prospect Park at Brooklyn to the English park at Munich. The fact that the Phœnix Park at Dublin is laid out in a fine, picturesque way does not forbid a great straight road through it—a road finer than in any strait-laced park in France. The late Robert Marnock was the best landscape gardener I have known, and I never saw one of his many gardens where...
1 minute read
The word "garden" itself means an enclosed space, a garth or yard surrounded by walls, as opposed to unenclosed fields and woods. The formal garden, with its insistence on strong bounding lines, is, strictly speaking, the only "garden" possible. All other gardens are, of course, impossible to the authors—the Parc Monceau, the informal gardens about Paris, Glasnevin, the Botanic Gardens in Regent's Park and at Sheffield, Golder's Hill, Greenlands, Pendell Court, Rhianva, and the thousand cottage, rectory, and other British gardens where no wall is seen! The Bamboo garden at Shrubland, the Primrose garden at Munstead, the rock and other gardens, which we must keep in quiet places away from any sight of walls, are all " impossible " to these authors! How much better it would be for every art if it were impossible for men to write about things of which by their own showing they have not...
1 minute read
Horticulture stands to garden design much as building does to architecture. This book has been written entirely from the standpoint of the designer, and therefore contains little or no reference to the actual methods of horticulture. Throughout the book it is modestly assumed that there can be no "design" in anything but in lines of stone, and clipped trees to "harmonise" with the stone, and to bring in "order" and "balance." A Longleat, Highclere or Little Trianon, or any of the many English places which are planted in picturesque ways can show no design; but a French town, with its wretched lines of tortured Limes, is "pure" and "broad" in design. The naiveté of the book in this respect is often droll. One amusing passage is on p. 54:— However rich the details, there is no difficulty in grasping the principle of a garden laid out in an equal number...
2 minute read
The following glaring piece of injustice is due to want of the most elementary consideration of garden design:— Grass-work as an artistic quantity can hardly be said to exist in landscape gardening. It is there considered simply as so much background to be broken up with shrubs and Pampas Grass and irregular beds (p. 135). The opposite of this is the fact. Grass-work as an "artistic quantity" did not exist in anything like the same degree before landscape gardening. One of the faults of the formal style of gardening still seen in France and Austria is that there is little or no Grass. Compare the Jardin des Plantes in Paris with the Parc Monceau, or the many other gardens about Paris in which Grass is an "artistic quantity." One of the most effective reasons indeed for adopting the English landscape garden was that it gave people some fresh and open...
2 minute read
Perhaps after the cemetery, the ugliest things in the fair land of France are the ugly old lines of clipped Limes which deface many French towns. Readers who have not seen these things can have no idea of their abominable hardness and ugliness, the natural form of the trees being destroyed, and deformed and hideous trees resulting from constant clipping. These gouty lines of clipped trees are praised as "noble walls" "pure and broad" in design, while Such a place, for instance, as Battersea Park is like a bad piece of architecture, full of details which stultify each other. The only good point in it is the one avenue, and this leads to nowhere. If this park had been planted out with groves and avenues of Limes, like the boulevard at Avallon, or the squares at Vernon, or even like the east side of Hyde Park between the Achilles statue...
6 minute read
The remarks quoted below on Nature and the clipping shears are not from Josh Billings, but from The Formal Garden , of which the literary merit, we are told in the preface, belongs to Mr. Blomfield. A clipped Yew tree is as much a part of Nature—that is, subject to natural laws—as a forest Oak; but the landscapist, by appealing to associations which surround the personification of Nature, holds up the clipped Yew tree to obloquy as something against Nature. So far as that goes, it is no more unnatural to clip a Yew tree than to cut Grass. I believe we cut Grass when we want hay, or soft turf to play on, but disfiguring a noble tree is not a necessary part of our work either for our profit or pleasure. Perhaps, as is probable, Mr. Blomfield has never noticed what a beautiful tree a Yew in its...
8 minute read
Now as a matter of fact in Nature—that is, in the visible phenomena of the earth's surface—there are no lines at all; "a line" is simply an abstraction which conveniently expresses the direction of a succession of objects which may be either straight or curved. "Nature" has nothing to do with either straight lines or curved; it is simply begging the question to lay it down as an axiom that curved lines are more "natural" than straight. Then men must never again talk of the "lines" of a ship! Perhaps Mr. Blomfield would accept a plumb line? One can hardly leave London an hour before a person who looks at the landscape may see the lines or boundaries between one mass and another. Who could stand amongst downs or an alpine valley and say there are no lines in them, inasmuch as one of the most visible and delightful things...