HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE SKETCH OF THE ENGLISH GARDEN.
"The Earth is the garden of Nature, and each fruitful country a
Paradise."--Sir Thomas Browne.
In the last chapter I observed that in dealing with our second
point--the ornamental treatment that is fit for a garden--we should be
brought into contact with the good and bad points of both the old and
new systems of gardening. Hence the following discursus upon the
historic English garden, which will, however, be as short as it can well
be made, not only because the writer has no desire to wander on a far
errand when his interest lies near home, but also because an essay, such
as this, is ever bound to be an inconclusive affair; and 'twere a pity
to lay a heavy burden upon a light horse!
At the outset of this section of our enquiry it is well to realise that
there is little known about the garden of earlier date than the middle
of the sixteenth century. Our knowledge of the mediaeval garden is only
to be acquired piecemeal, out of casual references in old chronicles,
and stray pictures in illuminated manuscripts, and in each case
allowance must be made for the fluent fancy of the artist. Moreover,
early notices of gardens deal mostly with the orchard, or the vegetable
or herb garden, where flowers grown for ornament occur in the borders of
the ground.
It is natural to ascribe the first rudiments of horticultural science in
this country to the Romans; and with the classic pastorals, or Pliny the
Younger's Letter to Apollinaris before us, in which an elaborate garden
is minutely and enthusiastically described, we need no further assurance
of the fitness of the Roman to impart skilled knowledge in all branches
of the science.
Loudon, in his noble "Arboretum et fruticetum Britannicum," enters at
large into the question of what trees and shrubs are indigenous to
Britain, and gives the probable dates of the introduction of such as are
not native to this country. According to Whitaker, whose authority
Loudon adopts, it would appear that the Romans brought us the plane, the
box, the elm, the poplar, and the chestnut. (The lime, he adds, was not
generally planted here till after the time of Le Notre: it was used
extensively in avenues planted here in the reign of Charles the Second.)
Of fruit trees, the Roman gave us the pear, the fig, the damson, cherry,
peach, apricot, and quince. The aboriginal trees known to our first
ancestors are the birch, alder, oak, wild or Scotch pine, mountain-ash
or rowan-tree, the juniper, elder, sweet-gale, dog-rose, heath, St
John's wort, and the mistletoe.
Authorities agree in ascribing the introduction of many other plants,
fruit trees, and trees of ornament or curiosity now common throughout
England, to the monks. And the extent of our indebtedness to the monks
in this matter may be gathered from the fact that monasteries abounded
here in early times; and the religious orders have in all times been
enthusiastic gardeners. Further be it remembered, many of the inmates of
our monasteries were either foreigners or persons who had been educated
in Italy or France, who would be well able to keep this country supplied
with specimens and with reminiscences of the styles of foreign gardens
up to date.
The most valuable authority on the subject of early English gardens is
Alexander Necham, Abbot of Cirencester (1157-1217). His references are
in the shape of notes from a commonplace-book entitled "Of the Nature of
Things," and he writes thus: "Here the gardens should be adorned with
roses and lilies, the turnsole (heliotrope), violets and mandrake; there
you should have parsley, cost, fennel, southern-wood, coriander, sage,
savery, hyssop, mint, rue, dittany, smallage, pellitory, lettuces,
garden-cress, and peonies.... A noble garden will give thee also
medlars, quinces, warden-trees, peaches, pears of St Riole,
pomegranates, lemons, oranges, almonds, dates, which are the fruits of
palms, figs, &c."[15] Here, in truth, is a delightful medley of the
useful and the beautiful, just like life! Yet the very use of the term
"noble," as applied to a garden, implies that even the
thirteenth-century Englishman had a standard of excellence to stir
ambition. Other garden flowers mentioned in Alexander's observations are
the sunflower, the iris and narcissus.
[Footnote 15: See "The Praise of Gardens."]
The garden described by Necham bespeaks an amount of taste in the
arrangement of the herbs, plants, and fruit-trees, but in the main it
corresponds with our kitchen-garden. The next English writer upon
gardens in point of date is Johannes de Garlandia, an English resident
in France; but here is a description of the writer's garden at Paris.
The ground here described consists of shrubbery, wood, grove, and
garden, and from the account given it is inferred that both in matters
of taste and in the horticultural and floral products of the garden,
France had advanced farther than England in garden-craft in the
fourteenth century, which is the date of the book.
In Mr Hudson Turner's "Observations on the State of Horticulture in
England"[16] in olden times he gives notices of the early dates in which
the rose was under cultivation. In the thirteenth century King John
sends a wreath of roses to his lady-love. Chronicles inform us that
roses and lilies were among the plants bought for the Royal Garden at
Westminster in 1276; and the annual rendering of a rose is one of the
commonest species of quit-rent in ancient conveyances, like the
"pepper-corn" of later times. The extent to which the culture of the
rose was carried is inferred from the number of sorts mentioned in old
books, which include the red, the sweet-musk, double and single, the
damask, the velvet, the double-double Provence rose, and the double and
single white rose. And the demand for roses seems to have been so great
in old days that bushels of them frequently served as the payment of
vassals to their lords, both in France and England. England has good
reason to remember the distinction between the red and the white rose.
[Footnote 16: "Archaeological Journal," vol. v. p. 295.]
Of all the flowers known to our ancestors, the gilly-flower was perhaps
the most common.
"The fairest flowers o' the season
Are our carnations and streak'd gilly flower."
_Winter's Tale._
"Their use," says a quaint writer, "is much in ornament, and comforting
the spirites by the sence of smelling." The variety of this flower, that
was best known in early times, was the wall gilly-flower, or bee-flower.
Another flower of common growth in mediaeval gardens and orchards is the
periwinkle.
"There sprang the violet all newe,
And fresh periwinkle, rich of hewe,
And flowers yellow, white and rede,
Such plenty grew there nor in the mede."
It is not considered probable that much art was expended in the laying
out of gardens before the fifteenth century; but I give a list of
illuminated MSS. in the Library of the British Museum, where may be
found illustrations of gardens, and which I take from Messrs Birch and
Jenner's valuable Dictionary of Principal Subjects in the British
Museum[17] under the head of Garden.
[Footnote 17: "Early Drawings and Illuminations." Birch and Jenner.
(Bagster, 1879, p. 134.)
"Gardens.
19 D. i. ff. I. etc.
20 A. xvii. f. 7b.
20 B. ii. f. 57.
14 803 f. 63.
18 851 f. 182.
18 852 f. 3. b.
26667 f. i.
Harl. 4425. f. 12. b.
Kings 7. f. 57.
6 E. ix. f. 15. b.
14 E. vi. f. 146.
15 E. iii. f. 122.
15 E. vi. f. 146.
16 G. v. f. 5.
17 F. i. f. 149 _b_.
19 A. vi. f. 2. 109.
19 C. vii. f. i.
20 C. v. ff. 7. _etc._
Eg. 2022. f. 36. _b_.
Harl. 4425. f. 160 _b_.
19720.
19 A. vi. f. 109."]
There is also a typical example of a fourteenth-century garden in the
Romaunt d'Alexandre (Bodleian Library). Here the flower garden or lawn
is separated by a wooden paling from the orchard, where a man is busy
pruning. An old painting at Hampton Court, of the early part of the
sixteenth century, gives pretty much the same class of treatment, but
here the paling is decorated with a chevron of white and red colour.
To judge from old drawings, our forefathers seem to have been always
partial to the greensward and trees, which is the landscape garden in
the "egg"! A good extent of grass is always provided. Formal flower-beds
do not often occur, and, where shown, they are sometimes surrounded by a
low wattled fence--a protection against rabbits, probably. Seats and
banks of chamomile are not unusual. A bank of earth seems to have been
thrown up against the enclosing wall; the front of the bank is then
faced with a low partition of brick or stone, and the mould, brought to
an even surface, is planted in various ways. Numerous illustrations of
the fifteenth century give a bowling-green and butts for archery. About
this date it is assumed the style of English gardening was affected by
French and Flemish methods, which our connection with Burgundy at that
time would bring about. To this period is also ascribed the introduction
of the "mount" in England, although one would almost say that it is but
a survival of the Celtic "barrow." It is a feature that came, however,
into very common use, and is thus recommended by Bacon: "I wish also, in
the very middle, a fair Mount, with three Ascents and Alleys, enough for
four to walk abreast, which I would have to be perfect circles, without
any Bulwarks or Imbossments, and the whole Mount to be thirty foot high,
and some fine Banqueting House with some chimneys neatly cast, and
without too much Glass."
The "mount" is said to have been originally contrived to allow persons
in the orchard to look over the enclosing wall, and would serve not only
as a place from which to enjoy a pretty view, but as a point of outlook
in case of attack. Moreover, when situated in a park where the deer
grazed, the unscrupulous sportsman might from thence shoot a buck. In
early days the mounts were constructed of wood or of stone, and were
curiously adorned within and without. Later on they resumed the old
barrow shape, and were made of earth, and utilized for the culture of
fruit trees. Lawson, an old writer of the sixteenth century, describes
them as placed in divers corners of the orchard, their ascent being made
by "stares of precious workmanship." When of wood, the mount was often
elaborately painted.
An account of works done at Hampton Court in the time of Henry VIII.,
mentions certain expenses incurred for "anticke" works; and referring to
Bailey's Dictionary, published early in the last century, the word
"antick," as applied to curiously-shaped trees, still survives, and is
explained as "odd figures or shapes of men, birds, beasts, &c., cut
out." From the above references, and others of like nature, we know that
the topiary art ("opus topiarum"), which dealt in quaintly-shaped trees
and shrubs, was in full practice here throughout the latter half of the
middle ages. Samuel Hartlib, in a book published in 1659, writes thus:
"About fifty years ago Ingenuities first began to flourish in England."
Lawson, writing in a jocose vein, tells how the lesser wood might be
framed by the gardener "to the shape of men armed in the field ready to
give battell; or swift-running greyhounds, or of well-scented and
true-running hounds to chase the deere or hunt the hare"; adding as a
recommendation that "this kinde of hunting shall not waste your corne,
nor much your coyne!"
I find that John Leland in his Itinerary, 1540, further confirms the use
of highly-decorated mounts: as at Wressel Castle, Yorkshire, he tells of
the gardens with the mote, and the orchards as exceeding fair; "and yn
the orchardes were mounts writhen about with degrees, like the turnings
in cokil shelles, to come to the top without payne." There is still to
be seen, or according to Murray's Guide, 1876, was then to be seen, at
Wotton, in Surrey, an artificial mount cut into terraces, which is a
relic of Evelyn's work.
The general shape of an old-fashioned garden is a perfect square, which
we take to be reminiscent of the square patch of ground which, in early
days, was partitioned off for the use of the family, and walled to
exclude cattle, or to define the property. It also repeats the
quadrangular court of big Tudor houses. We may also assume that the
shape would commend itself to the taste of the Renascence School of the
Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, as being that of classic times; for the
antique garden was fashioned in a square with enclosures of
trellis-work, espaliers, and clipt box hedges, regularly ornamented with
vases, fountains, and statuary.
The square shape was common to the French and Italian gardens also. Old
views of Du Cerceau, an architect of the time of Charles IX. and Henry
III., show a square in one part of the grounds and a circular labyrinth
in another: scarcely a plot but has this arrangement. The point to note,
however, is, that while the English garden might take the same general
outline as the foreign, it had its own peculiarities; and although each
country develops the fantastic ornament common to the stiff garden of
the period in its own way, things are not carried to the same pitch of
extravagant fancy in England as in France, Holland, or Italy.
Upon a general review of the subject of ornamental gardens, English and
foreign, we arrive at the conclusion that the type of garden produced by
any country is a question of soil and physical features, and a question
of race. The character of the scenery of a country, the section of the
land generally, no less than the taste of the people who dwell in it,
prescribes the style of the type of garden. The hand of Nature directs
the hand of Art.
Thus, in a hilly country like Italy, Nature herself prompts the division
of the garden-spaces into wide terraces, while Art, on her side,
provides that the terraces shall be well-proportioned as to width and
height, and suitably defined by masonry walls having balustraded fronts,
flights of steps, arcades, temples, vases, statues, &c.
Lady Mary Montagu's description of the _Giardino Jiusti_ is a case in
point: she depicts, as far as words can, how admirably it complies with
the conditions of the scenery. The palace lies at the foot of a mountain
"near three miles high, covered with a wood of orange, lemon, citron,
and pomegranate trees, which is all cut up into walks, and divided into
terraces that you may go into a separate garden from every floor of the
house, diversified with fountains, cascades, and statues, and joined by
easy marble staircases, which lead from one to another." It is a hundred
years since this description was written, but the place is little
altered to this day: "Who will now take the pains to climb its steep
paths, will find the same charm in the aged cypresses, the oddly clipped
ilexes and boxes, the stiff terraces and narrow, and now overgrown,
beds."[18]
[Footnote 18: "The Garden."--WALTHER HOWE.]
In France, where estates are larger, and the surface of the country more
even and regular, the ornamental grounds, while following the Italian in
certain particulars, are of wider range on the flat, and they attain
picturesqueness upon lines of their own. The taste of the people,
conveniently answering to the conditions of the country, runs upon long
avenues and spacious grounds, divided by massive trellises into a series
of ornamental sections--_Bocages_, _Cabinets de Verdure_, &c., which by
their form and name, flatter the Arcadian sentiment of a race much given
to idealisation. "I am making winding alleys all round my park, which
will be of great beauty," writes Madame de Sevigne, in 1671. "As to my
labyrinth, it is neat, it has green plots, and the palisades are
breast-high; it is a lovable spot."
The French have parks, says the travelled Heutzner, but nothing is more
different, both in compass and direction, than those common to England.
In France they invented the parks as fit surroundings to the fine
palaces built by Mansard and Le Notre, and the owners of these stately
chateaux gratified their taste for Nature in an afternoon promenade on a
broad stone terrace, gazing over a carved balustrade at a world made
truly artificial to suit the period. The style of Le Notre is, in fact,
based upon the theory that Nature shall contribute a bare space upon
which man shall lay out a garden of symmetrical character, and trees,
shrubs, and flowers are regarded as so much raw material, out of which
Art shall carve her effects.
Indeed, the desire for symmetry is carried to such extravagant lengths
that the largest parks become only a series of square or oblong
enclosures, regularly planted walks, bounded by chestnuts or limes;
while the gardens are equally cut up into lines of trellises and
palisades. In describing the Paris gardens Horace Walpole says, "they
form light corridors and transpicuous arbours, through which the
sunbeams play and checker the shade, set off the statues, vases, and
flowers, that marry with their gaudy hotels, and suit the gallant and
idle society who paint the walks between their parterres, and realise
the fantastic scenes of Watteau and Durfe!" In another place he says
that "many French groves seem green chests set upon poles. In the garden
of Marshall de Biron, at Paris, consisting of fourteen acres, every walk
is button-holed on each side by lines of flower-pots, which succeed in
their seasons. When I saw it there were nine thousand pots of asters or
la Reine Marguerite."
In Holland, which Butler sarcastically describes as
"A land that rides at anchor, and is moor'd,
In which they do not live, but go aboard"--
the conditions are not favourable to gardening. Man is here indebted to
Nature, in the first place, for next to nothing: Air, Earth, and Water
are, as it were, under his control. The trees grow, the rivers run, as
they are directed; and the very air is made to pay toll by means of the
windmills.
To begin with, Holland has a meagre list of indigenous trees and shrubs,
and scarcely an indigenous ligneous flora. There is little wood in the
country, for the heavy winds are calculated to destroy high-growing
trees, and the roots cannot penetrate into the ground to any depth,
without coming to water. The land is flat, and although artificial
mountains of granite brought from Norway and Sweden have been erected as
barriers against the sea, there is scarcely a stone to be found except
in the Island of Urk.
The conditions of the country being so unfavourable to artistic
handling, it needs a determined effort on man's part to lift things
above the dead-level of the mean and commonplace. Yet see how Nature's
defects may only prove Art's opportunity! Indeed, it is singular to note
how, as it were, in a spirit of noble contrariness, the Dutch garden
exhibits the opposite grace of each natural defect of the land. The
great plains intersected with sullen watercourses yield up only slight
strips of land, _therefore_ these niggardly strips, snatched from "an
amphibious world" (as Goldsmith terms it), shall be crammed with beauty.
The landscape outside gapes with uniform dulness, _therefore_ the garden
within shall be spick and span. The flat treeless expanse outside offers
no objects for measuring distance, _therefore_ the perspective of the
garden shall be a marvel of adroit planning and conjured proportions.
The room is small, _therefore_ its every inch shall seem an ell. The
garden is a mere patch, _therefore_ the patch shall be elaborately
darned and pattern-stitched all over. The eye may not travel far, or can
get no joy in a distant view, _therefore_ it shall rest in pure content,
focussed upon a scene where rich and orderly garniture can no farther
go.
Thus have the ill-conditions of the land proved blessings in disguise.
Necessity, the mother of invention, has produced the Dutch garden out of
the most untoward geography, and if we find in its qualities and
features traces of the conditions which surrounded its birth and
development it is no wonder. Who shall blame the prim shapes and
economical culture where even gross deception shall pass for a virtue if
it be successful! Or the regular strips of ground, the long straight
canals, the adroit vistas of grassy terraces long-drawn out, the trees
ranged in pots, or planted in the ground at set intervals and carefully
shorn to preserve the limit of their shade! Nay, one can be merciful to
the garden's usual crowning touch, which you get at its far end--a
painted landscape of hills and dales and clumps of trees to beguile the
enamoured visitor into the fond belief that Holland is not Holland: and,
in the foreground the usual smiling wooden boy, shooting arrows at
nothing, happy in the deed, and tin hares squatting in likely nooks,
whose shy hare eyes have worn the same startled gaze these sixty years
or more, renewed with fresh paint from time to time as rust requires.
Yet the Earth is richer and mankind happier for the Dutch garden!
And, as though out of compassion for the Dutchman's difficulties, kind
Nature has put into his hands the bulb, as a means whereby he may attain
the maximum of gaudy colour within the minimum of space. Given a few
square yards of rescued earth and sufficient manure, and what cannot the
neat-handed, frugal-minded, microscopic-eyed Dutchman do in the way of
concentrated design with his bulbs, his clipt shrubs, his trim beds, his
trickles of water, and strips of grass and gravel! And should all other
resources fail he has still his pounded brick-dust, his yellow sand, his
chips of ores and spars and green glass, which, though they may serve
only remotely to suggest Nature, will at all events carry your mind off
to the gay gardens of precious stones of fairyland literature!
Indeed, once embarked upon his style of piquancy-at-any-price, and it is
hard to see where the Dutch gardener need stop! In this sophisticated
trifling--this lapidary's mosaic--this pastry-cook's decoration--this
child's puzzle of coloured earth, substituted for coloured living
flowers--he pushes Art farther than the plain Englishman approves. It
is, however, only one step farther than ordinary with him. All his
dealings with Nature are of this abstract sort: his details are clever,
and he is ingenious, if not imaginative, in his wholes. Still, I repeat,
the Earth is richer, and mankind happier for the Dutch garden. There is
an obvious excuse for its over-fancifulness in George Meredith's remark
that "dulness is always an irresistible temptation for brilliance." That
the Dutchman should be thus able to compete with unfriendly Nature, and
to reverse the brazen of the unkind land of his birth, is an achievement
that reflects most creditably upon the artistic capacities of his
nation.
But England--
"This other Eden, demi-paradise"--
suggests a garden of a less-constrained order than either of these. Not
that the English garden is uniformly of the same type, at the same
periods. The variety of the type is to be accounted for in two ways:
firstly, by the ingrained eclecticism of the British mind; secondly, by
the changeful character of the country--this district is flat and open,
this is hilly--so that mere conformity to the lie of the land would
produce gardens which belong now to the French type, now to the Italian.
It is the same with British Art of all kinds, of all times: in days long
before the Norman visitation and ever since, the English Designer has
leant more or less upon foreign initiative, which goes to prove either
how inert is his own gift of origination, or how devious may be the
tastes of a mixed race.
But if the English garden cannot boast of singular points of interest,
if its art reflects foreign countries, it bears the mark of the English
taste for landscape, which gives it distinction and is suggestive of
very charming effects. The transcendent characteristic of the English
garden is derived from and gets its impulse from the prevailing
influence of Nature at home. It has the characteristics of the country.
It is, I know, commonly held now-a-days that the taste for landscape is
wholly of modern growth. So far as England is concerned it came in, they
say, with Thomson in poetry, and with Brown in gardens. So far as
relates to the _conscious_ relish for Nature, so far as relates to the
love of Nature as a mirror of the moods of the mind, or as a refuge from
man, this assertion may be true enough. Yet, surely the _conscious_
delight in landscape must have been preceded by an _unconscious_
sympathy this way: it could not have sprung without generation. Artistic
sight is based upon instinct, feeling, perceptions that reach one knows
not how far back in time, it does not come by magic.
See also what a rude, slatternly affair this much-lauded
landscape-garden of the "immortal Brown" was! Here are two sorts of
gardens--the traditional garden according to Bacon, the garden according
to Brown. Both are Nature, but the first is Nature in an ideal dress,
the second is Nature with no dress at all. The first is a garden for a
civilised man, the second is a garden for a gipsy. The first is a
picture painted from a cherished model, the second is a photograph of
the same model undressed. Brown's work, in fact, represents the garden's
return to its original barbaric self--the reinauguration of the
elemental. Let it not be said, then, that Brown discovered the model,
for her fairness was an established fact or she would not have been so
richly apparelled when he lighted upon her. In other words, the love of
the Earth--"that green-tressed goddess," Coleridge calls her--was no new
thing in Brown's day: the sympathy for the woodland world, the love of
tree, flower, and grass is behind the manipulated stiff garden of the
fifteenth and two succeeding centuries, and it is the abiding source of
all enthusiasm in garden-craft.
How long this taste for landscape had existed in pre-Thomsonian days it
does not fall to us to determine. Suffice it to say that so long as
there has been an English school of gardening this sympathy for
landscape has found expression in the English garden.[19] The high thick
garden-walls of the old fighting-days shall have ample outlooks in the
shape of "mounts," from whence views may be had of the open country. The
ornamental value of forest trees is well-known and appreciated. Even in
the thirteenth century the English gardener is on the alert for new
specimens and "trees of curiosity," and he is a master of horticulture.
In Chaucer's day he revels in the greensward,
"Ful thikke of gras, ful softe and swete."
And the early ballads as I have already shown are full of allusion to
scenery and woodland. In the days of fine gardens the Englishman must
still have his four acres "to the green," his adjuncts of shrubbery,
wilderness, and park. Nay, Henry VIII.'s garden at Nonsuch, had its
wilderness of ten acres. "Chaucer opens his Clerke's Tale with a bit of
landscape admirable for its large style," says Mr Lowell, "and as well
composed as any Claude" ("My Study Windows," p. 22). "What an airy
precision of touch is here, and what a sure eye for the points of
character in landscape." So, too, can Milton rejoice in
"Nature boon
Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain,"
and Herrick:
"Sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,
Of April, May, of June, and July flowers."
[Footnote 19: "English scenery of that special type which we call
homely, and of which we are proud as only to be found in England, is,
indeed, the production of many centuries of that conservatism which has
spared the picturesque timber, and of that affectionate regard for the
future which has made men delight to spend their money in imprinting on
the face of Nature their own taste in trees and shrubs." ("Vert and
Venery," by VISCOUNT LYMINGTON; _Nineteenth Century_, January, 1891.)]
Nor is this taste for landscape surprising in a country where the
natural scenery is so fair and full of meaning. There are the solemn
woods, the noble trees of forest and park: the "fresh green lap" of the
land, so vividly green that the American Hawthorne declares he found "a
kind of lustre in it." There is the rich vegetation, and "in France, and
still less in Italy," Walpole reminds us, "they could with difficulty
attain that verdure which the humidity of our climate bestows." There
are the leafy forest ways gemmed with flowers; the vast hunting-grounds
of old kings, the woodland net of hazel coppice, the hills and dales,
sunned or shaded, the plains mapped out with hedgerows and enlivened
with the glitter of running water: the heather-clad moors, the golden
gorse covers, the rolling downs dotted over with thorns and yews and
chalk cliffs, the upland hamlets with their rosy orchards, the farm
homesteads nestling in green combes, the grace of standing corn, the
girdle of sea with its yellow shore or white, red, or grey rocks, its
wolds and tracts of rough uncultivated ground, with bluffs and bushes
and wind-harassed trees--Nature's own "antickes"--driven like green
flames, and carved into grotesque shapes by the biting gales. There are
the
"Russet lawns, and fallows grey
Where the nibbling flocks do stray,
Mountains on whose barren breast
The labouring clouds do often rest,
Meadows prim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks and rivers wide"--
the land that Richard Jefferies says "wants no gardening, it _cannot_ be
gardened; the least interference kills it"--English woodland whose
beauty is in its detail. There is nothing empty and unclothed here. Says
Jefferies, "If the clods are left a little while undisturbed in the
fields, weeds spring up and wild flowers bloom upon them. Is the hedge
cut and trimmed, lo! the bluebells flower the more, and a yet fresher
green buds forth upon the twigs." "Never was there a garden like the
meadow," cries this laureate of the open fields; "there is not an inch
of the meadow in early summer without a flower."
And if the various parts and details of an English landscape are so
beautiful in themselves, what shall we say of the scenery when Nature,
turned artist, sweeps across it the translucent tints of dawn or sunset,
or wind and cloud-fantasy; or veil of purple mist, or grey or red haze,
or drift of rain-shower thrown athwart the hills, for the sunbeams to
try their edge upon; or any of the numberless atmospheric changes, pure
and tender, stern and imperious, that our humid climate has ever ready
to hand!
Shut in, as we in England are, with our short breadths of view ("on a
scale to embrace," remarks George Meredith), folded, as it were, in a
field-sanctuary of Nature-life--girt about with scenery that is at once
fair, compact, sweetly familiar and companionable, yet so changefully
coloured, so full of surprises as the day jogs along to its evensong as
to hold observation on the stretch, to force attention to Nature's last
word, to fill the fallow-mind of lonely country folk with gentle wonder,
and swell the "harvest of a quiet eye," is it strange that a land like
ours should have bred an unrivalled school of Nature-readers among
gardeners, painters, and poets? "As regards grandeur," says Hawthorne,
"there are loftier scenes in many countries than the best that England
can show; but, for the picturesqueness of the smallest object that lies
under its gentle gloom and sunshine, there is no scenery like it
anywhere." ("Our Old Home," p. 78.)
The _real_ world of England, then, is, in the Englishman's opinion,
itself so fair "it wants no gardening." Our school of gardeners seem to
have found this out; for the task of the gardener has been rather that
of translator than of creator; he has not had to labour at an artificial
world he himself had made, but only to adorn, to interpret the world as
it is, in all its blithe freedom. "The earth is the garden of Nature,
and each fruitful country a Paradise;" and in England, "the world's best
garden," man has only had to focus the view and frame it. Flowers,
odours, dews, glistening waters, soft airs and sounds, noble trees,
woodland solitudes, moonlight bowers, have been always with us.
It might seem ungenerous to institute a comparison between the French
and English styles of gardening, and to put things in a light
unfavourable to the foreigner, had not the task been already done for us
by a Frenchman in a most outspoken manner. Speaking of the French
gardens, Diderot, in his Encyclopaedia (_Jardin_) says: "We bring to bear
upon the most beautiful situations a ridiculous and paltry taste. The
long straight alleys appear to us insipid; the palisades cold and
formless. We delight in devising twisted alleys, scroll-work parterres,
and shrubs formed into tufts; the largest lots are divided into little
lots. It is not so with a neighbouring nation, amongst whom gardens in
good taste are as common as magnificent palaces are rare. In England,
these kinds of walks, practicable in all weathers, seem made to be the
sanctuary of a sweet and placid pleasure; the body is there relaxed, the
mind diverted, the eyes are enchanted by the verdure of the turf and the
bowling-greens; the variety of flowers offers pleasant flattery to the
smell and sight, Nature alone, modestly arrayed, and never made up,
there spreads out her ornaments and benefits. How the fountains beget
the shrubs and beautify them! How the shadows of the woods put the
streams to sleep in beds of herbage." This is poetry! but it is well
that one French writer (and he so distinguished) should be found to
depict an English garden, when architects like Jussieu and Antoine
Richard signally failed to reproduce the thing, to order, upon French
soil! And the _Petit Trianon_ was in itself an improvement upon, or
rather a protest against, the sumptuous splendour of the _Orangerie_,
the basins of Latona and of Neptune, and the superb _tapis vert_, with
its bordering groves of clipt trees and shrubs. Yet here is Arthur
Young's unflattering description of the Queen's _Jardin Anglois_ at
Trianon: "It contains about 100 acres, disposed in the taste of what we
read of in books of Chinese gardening, whence it is supposed the English
style was taken. There is more of Sir William Chambers here than of Mr
Brown,[20] more effort than Nature, and more expense than taste. It is
not easy to conceive anything that Art can introduce in a garden that is
not here; woods, rocks, lawns, lakes, rivers, islands, cascades,
grottoes, walks, temples, and even villages." Truly a _Jardin Anglois_!
[Footnote 20: Miss Edwards (and I quote from her edition of Young's
"Travels in France," p. 101) has a note to the effect that the Mr Brown
here referred to is "Robert Brown, of Markle, contributor to the
_Edinburgh Magazine_, 1757-1831." Yet, surely this is none other than Mr
"Capability" Brown, discoverer of English scenery, reputed father of the
English garden!]
We may well prefer Diderot's simile for the English garden as "the
sanctuary of a sweet and placid pleasure" to the bustling crowd of
miscellaneous elements that took its name in vain in the _Petit
Trianon_!
For an English garden is at once stately and homely--homely before all
things. Like all works of Art it is conventionally treated, and its
design conscious and deliberate. But the convention is broad, dignified,
quiet, homogeneous, suiting alike the characteristics of the country and
of the people for whom it is made. Compared with this, the foreign
garden must be allowed to be richer in provocation; there is distinctly
more fancy in its conceits, and its style is more absolute and
circumspect than the English. And yet, just as Browning says of
imperfection, that it may sometimes mean "perfection hid," so, here our
deficiencies may not mean defects.
In order that we may compare the English and foreign garden we must
place them on common ground; and I will liken each to a pastoral
romance. Nature is idealised, treated fancifully in each, yet how
different the quality of the contents, the method of presentment, the
style, the technique of this and that, even when the design is
contemporaneous!
A garden is, I say, a sort of pastoral romance, woven upon a background
of natural scenery. In the exercise of his pictorial genius, both the
foreign and English artist shall run upon natural things, and
transcribe Nature imaginatively yet realisably; each composition shall
have a pastoral air, and be rustic after its fashion. But how different
the platform, how different the mental complexion, the technique of the
artists! How different the detail and the atmosphere of the garden. The
rusticity of the foreign garden is dished up in a more delectable form
than is the case in the English, but there is not the same open-air
feeling about this as about that; it does not convey the same sense of
unexhausted possibilities--not the same tokens of living enjoyment of
Nature, of heart-to-heart fellowship with her. The foreign garden is
over-wrought, too full: it is a passionless thing--like the gaudy birds
of India, finely plumed but songless; like the prize rose, without
sweetness.
Of the garden of Italy, who shall dare to speak critically. Child of
tradition: heir by unbroken descent, inheritor of the garden-craft of
the whole civilised world. It stands on a pinnacle high above the
others, peerless and alone: fit for the loveliest of lands--
... "Woman-country, wooed not wed,
Loved all the more by Earth's male-lands,
Laid to their hearts instead"--
and it may yet be seen upon its splendid scale, splendidly adorned, with
straight terraces, marble statues, clipped ilex and box, walks bordered
with azalea and camellia, surrounded with groves of pines and
cypresses--so frankly artistic, yet so subtly blending itself into the
natural surroundings--into the distant plain, the fringe of purple
hills, the gorgeous panorama of the Alps with its background of glowing
sky. With such a radiant country to conjure with, we may truly say "The
richly provided, richly require."
If we may speak our mind of the French and Dutch gardens, they in no
wise satisfy English taste as regards their relation to Nature. Diderot
has said that it is the peculiarity of the French to judge everything
with the mind. It is from this standpoint that the Frenchman treats
Nature in a garden. He is ever seeking to unite the accessory portions
with the _ensemble_. He overdoes design. He gives you the impression
that he is far more in love with his own ideas about Nature than with
Nature herself; that he uses her resources not to interpret them or
perfect them along their own lines, but express his own interesting
ideas. He must provide stimulus for his imagination; his nature demands
food for reverie, point for ecstasy, for delicious self-abandonment, for
bedazzlement with ideal beauty, and the garden shall supply him with
these whatever the cost to the materials employed. Hence a certain
unscrupulousness towards Nature in the French garden; hence the daring
picturesqueness, its legerdemain. Nature edited thus, is to the
Englishman but Nature in effigy, Nature used as a peg for fantastical
attire, Nature with a false lustre that tells of lead alloy--Nature that
has forgotten what she is like.
In an English garden, as Diderot notes, Nature is handled with more
reverence, her rights are more respected. I am willing to allow that
something of the reserve traceable in English art is begotten of the
phlegmatic temper of the race that rarely gets beyond a quiescent
fervour; and this temper, exhibited in a garden would incline us always
to let well alone and not press things too hard. If the qualities of an
English garden that I speak of are to be attributed to this temper,
then, to judge by results, _laissez faire_ is not a bad motto for the
gardener! Certain it is that the dominance of man is more hinted at here
than proclaimed. Compared with foreign examples we sooner read through
its quaintnesses and braveries their sweet originals in Nature: nay,
even when we have idealised things to our hearts' full bent, they shall
yet retain the very note and rhythm of the woodland world from whence
they sprang--"English in all, of genius blithely free."[21]
[Footnote 21: Lowell's "Ode to Fielding."]
And this is true even in that extreme case, the Jacobean garden, where
we have much the same quips and cranks, the same quaint power of
metrical changes and playful fancy of the poetry of Herbert, Vaughan,
Herrick, and Donne; even the little clean-cut pedantries of this
artfullest of all phases of English garden-craft make for a kind of
bland stateliness and high-flown serenity, that bases its appeal upon
placid beauty rather than upon mere ingenuity or specious extravagance.
The conventionalities of its borders, its terraces and steps and images
in lead or marble, its ornamental water, its trim geometrical patterns,
its quincunx, clipped hedges, high hedges, and architectural adornments
shall be balanced by great sweeps of lawn and noble trees that are not
constrained to take hands, as in France, across the road and to look
proper, but are left to grow large and thick and wide and free. True
that there is about the Jacobean garden an air of scholarliness and
courtliness; a flavour of dreamland, Arcadia, and Italy--a touch of the
archaic and classical--yet the thing is saved from utter affectation by
our English out-of-door life which has bred in us an innate love of the
unconstrained, a sympathy that keeps its hold on reality, and these give
an undefinable quality of freshness to the composition as a whole.[22]
[Footnote 22: "Mr _Evelyn_ has a pleasant villa at _Deptford_," writes
Gibson, "a fine garden for walks and hedges (especially his holly one
which he writes of in his 'Sylva') ... In his garden he has four large
round philareas, smooth-clipped, raised on a single stalk from the
ground, a fashion now much used. _Part of his garden is very woody and
shady for walking_; but his garden not being walled, has little of the
best fruits."]
To sum up. The main difference in the character of the English and the
foreign schools of gardening lies in this, that the design of the
foreign leans ever in the direction of artificiality, that of England
towards natural freedom. And a true garden should have an equal regard
for Nature and Art; it should represent a marriage of contraries, should
combine finesse and audacity, subtilty and simplicity, the regular and
the unexpected, the ideal and the real "bound fast in one with golden
ease." In a French or Dutch garden the "yes" and "no" of Art and Nature
are always unequally yoked. Nature is treated with sparse courtesy by
Art, its individuality is ignored, it sweats like a drudge under its
load of false sentiment. "Sike fancies weren foolerie."
But in England, though we hold Nature in duress, we leave her unbound;
if we mew her up for cultivation, we leave her inviolate, with a chance
of vagrant liberty and a way of escape. Thus, you will note how the
English garden stops, as it were, without ending. Around or near the
house will be the ordered garden with terraces and architectural
accessories, all trim and fit and nice. Then comes the smooth-shaven
lawn, studded and belted round with fine trees, arranged as it seems
with a divine carelessness; and beyond the lawn, the ferny heather-turf
of the park, where the dappled deer browse and the rabbits run wild, and
the sun-chequered glades go out to meet, and lose themselves "by green
degrees" in the approaching woodland,--past the river glen, the steep
fields of grass and corn, the cottages and stackyards and grey church
tower of the village; past the ridge of fir-land and the dark sweep of
heath-country into the dim waving lines of blue distance.
So that however self-contained, however self-centred the stiff old
garden may seem to be, it never loses touch with the picturesque
commonplaces of our land; never loses sympathy with the green world at
large, but, in a sense, embraces and locks in its arms the whole
country-side as far as eye can see.