THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN."
"'Pealing from Jove to Nature's bar
Bold Alteration pleades
Large evidence; but Nature soon
Her righteous doom areads."--SPENSER.
Why were the old-fashioned gardens destroyed? Firstly, because the
traditional garden of the early part of the eighteenth century, when the
reaction set in, represented a style which had run to seed, and men were
tired of it; secondly, because the taste for foreign trees and shrubs,
that had existed for a long time previously, then came to a head, and it
was found that the old type of garden was not fitted for the display of
the augmented stock of foreign material. Here was a new element in
garden-craft, a new chance of decoration in the way of local colours in
planting, which required a new adjustment of garden-effects; and as
there was some difficulty in accommodating the new and the old, the
problem was met by the abolition of the old altogether.
As to this matter of the sudden increase of specimen plants, Loudon
remarks that in the earlier century the taste for foreign plants was
confined to a few, and they not wealthy persons; but in the eighteenth
century the taste for planting foreign trees extended itself among rich
landed proprietors. A host of amateurs, botanists, and commercial
gardeners were busily engaged in enriching the British Arboretum, and
the garden-grounds had to be arranged for new effects and a new mode of
culture. In Loudon's "Arboretum" (p. 126) is a list of the species of
foreign trees and shrubs introduced into England up to the year 1830. He
calculates that the total number of specimens up to the time that he
wrote was about 1400, but the numbers taken by centuries are: in the
sixteenth century, 89; in the seventeenth century, 131; in the
eighteenth century, 445; and in the first three decades of the
nineteenth century, 699!
Men stubbed up the old gardens because they had grown tired of their
familiar types, as they tire of other familiar things. The eighteenth
century was essentially a critical age, an age of enquiry, and
gardening, along with art, morals, and religion, came in for its share
of coffee-house discussion, and elaborate essay-writing, and nothing was
considered satisfactory. As to gardening, it was not natural enough for
the critics. The works of Salvator and Poussin had pictured the grand
and terrible in scenery, Thomson was writing naturalistic poetry,
Rousseau naturalistic prose. Garden-ornament was too classical and
formal for the varnished _litterateur_ of the _Spectator_ and the
_Guardian_--too symmetrical for the jingling rhymester of a sing-song
generation--too artificial for the essayist "'Pealing from Jove to
Nature's bar," albeit he is privately content to go on touching up his
groves and grottoes at Twickenham, securing the services of a peer
"To form his quincunx, and to rank his vines."
Gardens are looked upon as so much "copy" to the essayist. What affected
tastes have these critics! What a confession of counterfeit love, of
selfish literary interest in gardens is this of Addison's: "I think
there are as many kinds of gardening as of poetry. Your makers of
parterres and flower-gardens are epigrammatists and sonneteers in this
art; contrivers of bowers and grottoes, treillages and cascades, are
romance writers." How beside nature, beside garden-craft, are such
pen-man's whimsies! "Nothing to the true pleasure of a garden," Bacon
would say.
Walpole's essay on gardening is entertaining reading, and his book gives
us glimpses of the country-seats of all the great ladies and gentlemen
who had the good fortune to be his acquaintances. His condemnation of
the geometrical style of gardening common in his day, though quieter in
tone than Pope's, was none the less effective in promoting a change of
style. He tells how in Kip's views of the seats of our nobility we have
the same "tiring and returning uniformity." Every house is approached by
two or three gardens, consisting perhaps of a gravel-walk and two grass
plats or borders of flowers. "Each rises above the other by two or
three steps, and as many walks and terrasses; and so many iron gates,
that we recollect those ancient romances in which every entrance was
guarded by nymphs or dragons. At Lady Orford's, at Piddletown, in
Dorsetshire, there was, when my brother married, a double enclosure of
thirteen gardens, each, I suppose, not a hundred yards square, with an
enfilade of correspondent gates; and before you arrived at these, you
passed a narrow gut between two terrasses that rose above your head, and
which were crowned by a line of pyramidal yews. A bowling-green was all
the lawn admitted in those times, a circular lake the extent of
magnificence."
Such an air of truth and soberness pervades Walpole's narrative, and to
so absurd an extent has formality been manifestly carried under the
auspices of Loudon and Wise, who had stocked our gardens with "giants,
animals, monsters, coats of arms, mottoes in yew, box, and holly," that
we are almost persuaded to be Vandals. "The compass and square, were of
more use in plantations than the nursery-man. The measured walk, the
quincunx, and the etoile imposed their unsatisfying sameness.... Trees
were headed, and their sides pared away; many French groves seem green
chests set upon poles. Seats of marble, arbours, and summer-houses,
terminated every vista." It is all very well for Temple to recommend the
regular form of garden. "I should hardly advise any of these attempts"
cited by Walpole, "in the form of gardens among us; _they are adventures
of too hard achievement for any common hands_." The truth will out! The
"dainter sense" of garden-craft has vanished! According to Walpole,
garden-adventure is to be henceforth journeyman's work, and Brown, the
immortal kitchen-gardener, leads the way.
It were unfair to suspect that the exigencies of sprightly writing had
carried Walpole beyond the bounds of accuracy in his description of the
stiff-garden as he knew it, for things were in some respects very bad
indeed. At the same time he is so engrossed with his abuse of old ways
of gardening, and advocacy of the landscape-gardener's new-fangled
notions, that his account of garden-craft generally falls short of
completeness. He omits, for instance, to notice the progress in
floriculture and horticulture of this time, the acquisitions being made
in the ornamental foreign plants to be cultivated in the open ground,
the green-house, and the stove. He omits to note that Loudon and Wise
stocked our gardens with more than giants, animals, monsters, &c., in
yew and box and holly. Because the names of these two worthies occur in
this gardening text-book of Walpole's, all later essayists signal them
out for blame. But Evelyn, who ranks as one of the three of England's
great gardeners of old days, has a kindlier word for them. He is
dilating upon the advantage to the gardener of the high clipped hedge as
a protection for his shrubs and flowers, and goes on to particularise an
oblong square, palisadoed with a hornbeam hedge "in that inexhaustible
magazine at Brompton Park, cultivated by those two industrious
fellow-gardeners, Mr Loudon and Mr Wise." This hedge protects the orange
trees, myrtles, and other rare perennials and exotics from the scorching
rays of the sun; and it equally well shelters the flowers. "Here the
Indian Narcissus, Tuberoses, Japan Lillies, Jasmines, Jonquills,
Periclimena, Roses, Carnations, with all the pride of the parterre,
intermixt between the tree-cases, flowery vases, busts, and statues,
entertain the eye, and breathe their redolent odours and perfumes to the
smell." Clearly there is an advantage in being a gardener if we write
about gardens (provided you are not a mere "landscape-gardener!").
One cannot deny that Horace Walpole did well to expose the absurd
vagaries which were being perpetrated about his time under Dutch
influences. Close alliance with Holland through the House of Orange had
affected every department of horticulture. True, it had enriched our
gardens and conservatories with many rare and beautiful species of
flowers and bulbs, and had imbued the English collector with the
tulip-mania. So far good. But to the same source we trace the reign of
the shears in the English garden, which made Art in a Garden ridiculous,
and gave occasion to the enemy to blaspheme.
"The gardeners about London," says Mr Lambert, writing to the Linnaean
Transactions in 1712, "were remarkable for fine cut greens, and clipt
yews in the shapes of birds, dogs, men, ships, &c. Mr. Parkinson in
Lambeth was much noticed for these things, and he had besides a few
myrtles, oleanders, and evergreens."
"The old order changeth ...
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."
And now is Art in a Garden become ridiculous. Since the beginning of
things English gardeners had clipped and trimmed their shrubs; but had
never carried the practice beyond a reasonable extent, and had combined
it with woody and shady effects. With the onset of Dutch influence
country-aspects vanish. Nature is reduced to a prosaic level. The
traditional garden, whose past had been one long series of noble chances
in fine company, now found content as the pedant's darling where it
could have no opening for living romance, but must be tricked out in
stage conventions, and dwindle more and more into a thing of shreds and
patches!
Having arrived at such a pass, it was time that change should come, and
change did come, with a vengeance! But let us not suppose that the
change was from wrong to right. For, indeed, the revolution meant only
that formality gone mad should be supplanted by informality gone equally
mad. And we may note as a significant fact, that the point of departure
is the destruction of the garden's boundaries, and the substitution of
the ha-ha. It was not for the wild improvers to realise how Art that
destroys its own boundaries is certainly doomed to soon have no country
to boast of at all! It proved so in this case. From this moment, the
very thought of garden-ornament was clean put out of mind, and the
grass is carried up to the windows of the great house, as though the
place were nothing better than a farm-shanty in the wilds of
Westmoreland!
But to return to the inauguration of the "landscape-garden." The hour
produced its men in Kent, and "the immortal Brown," as Repton calls him.
Like many another "discovery," theirs was really due to an accident.
Just as it was the closely-corked bottle that popped that gave birth to
champagne, so it was only when our heroes casually leaped the ha-ha that
they had made that they realised that all England outside was one vast
rustic garden, from whence it were a shame to exclude anything!
So began the rage for making all the surroundings of a house assume a
supposed appearance of rude Nature. Levelling, ploughing, stubbing-up,
was the order of the day. The British navvy was in great request--in
fact the day that Kent and Brown discovered England was this worthy's
natal day. Artificial gardens must be demolished as impostures, and
wriggling walks and turf put where they had stood. Avenues must be cut
down or disregarded; the groves, the alleys, the formal beds, the
terraces, the balustrades, the clipt hedges must be swept away as things
intolerable. For the "landscape style" does not countenance a straight
line, or terrace or architectural form, or symmetrical beds about the
house; for to allow these would not be to photograph Nature. As carried
into practice, the style demands that the house shall rise abruptly
from the grass, and the general surface of the ground shall be
characterised by smoothness and bareness (like Nature)! Hence in the
grounds of this period, house and country
"Wrapt all o'er in everlasting green
Make one dull, vapid, smooth and tranquil scene."
There is to my mind no more significant testimony to the attractiveness
and loveableness of the _regular_ garden as opposed to the opened-out
barbarism of the landscape-gardener's invention, than Horace Walpole's
lament over the old gardens at Houghton,[29] which has the force of
testimony wrung from unwilling lips:--
"When I had drank tea I strolled into the garden. They told me it
was now called the '_pleasure-ground_.' What a dissonant idea of
pleasure! Those groves, those _alleys_, where I have passed so many
charming moments, are now stripped up, or overgrown; many fond
paths I could not unravel, though with a very exact clue in my
memory. I met two gamekeepers and a thousand hares! In the days
when all my soul was tuned to pleasure and vivacity, I hated
Houghton and its solitude; _yet I loved this garden_; as now, with
many regrets, I love Houghton;--Houghton, I know not what to call
it: a monument of grandeur or ruin!"--(Walpole's Letters.)
[Footnote 29: Houghton was built by Sir R. Walpole, between 1722 and
1738. The garden was laid out in the stiff, formal manner by Eyre, "an
imitator of Bridgman," and contained 23 acres. The park contains some
fine old beeches. More than 1000 cedars were blown down here in February
1860.]
"What a dissonant idea of pleasure," this so-called "pleasure-ground of
the landscape-gardener!" "Those groves, those alleys where I have passed
so many charming moments, stripped up! How I loved this garden!" Here is
the biter bit, and it were to be more than human not to smile!
With all the proper appliances at hand it did not take long to
transform the stiff garden into the barbaric. It did not take long to
find out how _not_ to do what civilization had so long been learning how
to do! The ancient "Geometric or Regular style" of garden--the garden of
the aristocrat, with all its polished classicism--was to make way for
the so-called "Naturalesque or Landscape style," and the garden of the
_bourgeois_. Hope rose high in the breasts of the new professoriate. "A
boon! a boon!" quoth the critic. And there is deep joy in navvydom.
"Under the great leader, Brown," writes Repton ("Landscape Gardening,"
p. 327), "or rather those who patronised his discovery, we were taught
that Nature was to be our only model." It was a grand moment. A Daniel
had come to judgment! Nay, did not Brown "live to establish a fashion in
gardening which might have been expected to endure as long as Nature
should exist!"
The Landscape School of Gardeners, so-called, has been the theme of a
great deal of literature, but with the exception of Walpole's and
Addison's essays, and Pope's admirable chaff, very little has survived
the interest it had at the moment of publication.
The other chief writers of this School, in its early phase, are George
Mason, Whately,[30] Mason the poet, and Shenstone, our moon-struck
friend quoted above, with his "assignation seats with proper mottoes,
urns to faithful lovers," &c. Dr Johnson did not think much of
Shenstone's contributions to gardening:
"He began from this time to point his prospects, to diversify his
surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters, which he
did with such judgement and such fancy as made his little domain
the envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful--a place to
be visited by travellers and _copied by designers_. Whether to
plant a walk in undulating curves, and to place a bench at every
turn where there is an object to catch the view, to make water run
where it will be heard, and to stagnate where it will be seen; to
leave intervals where the eye will be pleased, and to thicken the
plantation where there is something to be hidden--demand any great
powers of the mind, I will not enquire; perhaps a surly and sullen
spectator may think such performances rather the sport than the
business of human reason."--(Dr Johnson, "Lives of the Poets,"
Shenstone.)
[Footnote 30: Thomas Whately's "Observations on Modern Gardening," was
published in 1770, fifteen years before Walpole's "Essay on Modern
Gardening." Gilpin's book "On Picturesque Beauty," though published in
part in 1782, belongs really to the second phase of the Landscape
School. Shenstone's "Unconnected Thoughts on the Garden" was published
in 1764, and is written pretty much from the standpoint of Kent. "An
Essay on Design in Gardening," by G. Mason, was published in 1795.]
Whately's "Observations on Modern Gardening," published in 1770, are
well written and distinctly valuable as bearing upon the historical side
of the subject. It says little for his idea of the value of Art in a
garden, or of the function of a garden as a refining influence in life,
to find Whately recommending "a plain field or a sheep-walk" as part of
a garden's embellishments--"as an agreeable relief, and even wilder
scenes."
But what astounds one more is, that a writer of Whately's calibre can
describe Kent's gardens at Stowe, considered to be his masterpiece, as a
sample of the non-formality of the landscape-gardener's Art, while he
takes elaborate pains to show that it is full of would-be artistic
subterfuges in Nature, full of architectural shams throughout. These
gardens were begun by Bridgman, "Begun," Whately says, "when regularity
was in fashion; and the original boundary is still preserved on account
of its magnificence, for round the whole circuit, of between three and
four miles, is carried a very broad gravel-walk, planted with rows of
trees, and open either to the park or the country; a deep sunk-fence
attends it all the way, and comprehends a space of near 400 acres. But
in the interior spaces of the garden few traces of regularity appear;
where it yet remains in the plantations it is generally disguised; every
symptom almost of formality is obliterated from the ground; and an
octagon basin at the bottom is now converted into an irregular piece of
water, which receives on one hand two beautiful streams, and falls on
the other down a cascade into a lake."
And then follows a list of sham architectural features that are combined
with sham views and prospects to match. "The whole space is divided into
a number of scenes, each distinguished with taste and fancy; and the
changes are so frequent, so sudden and complete, the transitions so
artfully conducted, that the ideas are never continued or repeated to
satiety." In the front of the house two elegant Doric pavilions. On the
brow of some rising grounds a Corinthian arch. On a little knoll an open
Ionic rotunda--an Egyptian pyramid stands on its brow; the Queen's
Pillar in a recess on the descent, the King's Pillar elsewhere; all the
three buildings mentioned are "peculiarly adapted to a garden scene."
In front of a wood three pavilions joined by arcades, all of the Ionic
order, "characteristically proper for a garden, and so purely
ornamental." Then a Temple of Bacchus, the Elysian fields, British
remains; misshaped elms and ragged firs are frequent in a scene of
solitude and gloom, which the trunks of dead trees assist. Then a large
Gothic building, with slated roofs, "in a noble confusion"; then the
Elysian fields, seen from the other side, a Palladian bridge, Doric
porticoes, &c, the whole thing finished off with the Temple of Concord
and Victory, probably meant as a not-undeserved compliment to the
successfully chaotic skill of the landscape-gardener, who is nothing if
not irregular, natural, non-formal, non-fantastical, non-artificial, and
non-geometrical.
Two other points about Whately puzzle me. How comes he to strain at the
gnat of formality in the old-fashioned garden, yet readily swallow the
camel at Stowe? How can he harmonise his appreciation of the elaborately
contrived and painfully assorted shams at Stowe, with his
recommendation, of a sheep-walk in your garden "as an agreeable relief,
and even wilder scenes"?
Whether the beauty of the general disposition of the ground at Stowe is
to be attributed to Kent or to Bridgman, who began the work, as Whately
says, "when regularity was in fashion," I cannot say. It is right to
observe, however, that the prevailing characteristic of Kent's and
Brown's landscapes was their smooth and bald surface. "Why this art has
been called 'landscape-gardening,'" says the plain-spoken Repton,
"perhaps he who gave it the title may explain. I can see no reason,
unless it be the efficacy which it has shown in destroying landscapes,
in which, indeed, it seems infallible." (Repton, p. 355.) "Our
virtuosi," said Sir William Chambers, "have scarcely left an acre of
shade, or three trees growing in a line from the Land's End to the
Tweed."
It did not take the wiser spirits long to realise that Nature left alone
was more natural. And this same Repton, who began by praising "the great
leader Brown," has to confess again and again that, so far as results
go, he is mistaken. The ground, he laments, must be everlastingly moved
and altered. "One of the greatest difficulties I have experienced in
practice proceeds from that fondness for levelling so prevalent in all
Brown's workmen; every hillock is by them lowered, and every hollow
filled, to produce a level surface." (Repton, p. 342.) Or again (p.
347): "There is something so fascinating in the appearance of water,
that Mr Brown thought it carried its own excuse, however unnatural the
situation; and therefore, in many places, under his direction, I have
found water, on the tops of the hills, which I have been obliged to
remove into lower ground _because the deception was not sufficiently
complete to satisfy the mind as well as the eye_." Indeed, in this
matter of levelling, Brown's system does not, on the face of it, differ
from Le Notre's, where the natural contour of the landscape was not of
much account; or rather, it was thought the better if it had no natural
contour at all, but presented a flat plain or plateau with no
excrescences to interfere with the designer's schemes.
So much, then, for the pastoral simplicity of Nature edited by the
"landscape-gardener." And let us note that under the auspices of the new
_regime_, not only is Nature to be changed, but changed more than was
ever dreamt of before; the transformation shall at once be more
determined in its character and more deceptive than had previously been
attempted. We were to have an artistically natural world, not a
naturally artistic one; the face of the landscape was to be purged of
its modern look and made to look primaeval. And in this doing, or
undoing, of things, the only art that was to be admitted was the art of
consummate deceit, which shall "satisfy the mind as well as the eye."
Yet call the man pope or presbyter, and beneath his clothes he is the
same man! There is not a pin to choose as regards artificiality in the
_aims_ of the two schools, only in the _results_. The naked or
_undressed_ garden has studied irregularity, while the _dressed_ garden
has studied regularity and style. The first has, perhaps, an excessive
regard for expression, the other has an emphatic scorn for expression.
One garden has its plotted levels, its avenues, its vistas, its sweeping
lawns, its terraces, its balustrades, colonnades, geometrical beds,
gilded temples, and sometimes its fountains that won't play, and its
fine vases full of nothing! The other begins with fetching back the
chaos of a former world, and has for its category of effects, sham
primaevalisms, exaggerated wildness, tortured levellings, cascades,
rocks, dead trunks of trees, ruined castles, lakes on the top of hills,
and sheep-runs hard by your windows. One school cannot keep the snip of
the scissors off tree and shrub, the other mimics Nature's fortuitous
wildness in proof of his disdain for the white lies of Art.
And all goes to show, does it not? that inasmuch as the art of gardening
implies craft, and as man's imitation of Nature is bound to be unlike
Nature, it were wise to be frankly inventive in gardening on Art lines.
Success may attend one's efforts in the direction of Art, but in the
direction of Nature, never.
The smooth, bare, and almost bald appearance which characterises Brown
and Kent's school fails to satisfy for long, and there springs up
another school which deals largely in picturesque elements, and rough
intricate effects. The principles of the "Picturesque School," as it was
called, are to be found in the writings of the Rev. William Gilpin and
Sir Uvedale Price. Their books are full of careful observations upon the
general composition of landscape-scenery, and what was then called
"Landscape Architecture," as though every English building of older days
that was worth a glance had not been "Landscape Architecture" fit for
its site! Gilpin's writings contain an admirable discourse upon "Forest
Scenery," well illustrated. This work is in eight volumes, in part
published in 1782, and it consists mainly in an account of the author's
tours in every part of Great Britain, with a running commentary on the
beauties of the scenery, and a description of the important country
seats he passed on the way. Price helped by his writings to stay the
rage for destroying avenues and terraces, and we note that he is fully
alive to the necessity of uniting a country-house with the surrounding
scenery by architectural adjuncts.
The taste for picturesque gardening was doubtless helped by the growing
taste for landscape painting, exhibited in the works of the school of
Wilson and Gainsborough, and in the pastoral writings of Thomson,
Crabbe, Cowper, and Gray. It would farther be accelerated, as we
suggested at the outset of this chapter, by the large importation of
foreign plants and shrubs now going on.
What is known as the Picturesque School soon had for its main exponent
Repton. He was a genius in his way--a born gardener,[31] able and
thoughtful in his treatments, and distinguished among his fellows by a
broad and comprehensive grasp of the whole character and surroundings of
a site, in reference to the general section of the land, the style of
the house to which his garden was allied, and the objects for which it
was to be used. The sterling quality of his writings did much to clear
the air of the vapourings of the critics who had gone before him, and
his practice, founded as it was upon sound principles, redeemed the
absurdities of the earlier phase of his school and preserved others from
further development of the silly rusticities upon which their mind
seemed bent. Although some of his ideas may now be thought pedantic and
antiquated, the books which contain them will not die. Passages like the
following mark the man and his aims: "I do not profess to follow Le
Notre or Brown, but, selecting beauties from the style of each, to adopt
so much of the grandeur of the former as may accord with a palace, and
so much of the grace of the latter as may call forth the charms of
natural landscape. Each has its proper situation; and good taste will
make fashion subservient to good sense" (p. 234). "In the rage for
picturesque beauty, let us remember that the landscape holds an inferior
rank to the historical picture; one represents nature, the other relates
to man in a state of society" (p. 236).
[Footnote 31: Loudon calls this School "Repton's," the "_Gardenesque_"
School, its characteristic feature being "the display of the beauty of
trees and other plants _individually_."]
Repton sums up the whole of his teaching in the preface to his "Theory
and Practice of Landscape Gardening" under the form of objections to
prevailing errors, and they are so admirable that I cannot serve the
purposes of my book better than to insert them here.
Objection No. 1. "There is no error more prevalent in modern gardening,
or more frequently carried to excess, than taking away hedges to unite
many small fields into one extensive and naked lawn before plantations
are made to give it the appearance of a park; and where ground is
subdivided by sunk fences, imaginary freedom is dearly purchased at the
expense of actual confinement."
No. 2. "The baldness and nakedness round the house is part of the same
mistaken system, of concealing fences to gain extent. A palace, or even
an elegant villa, in a grass field, appears to me incongruous; _yet I
have seldom had sufficient influence to correct this common error_."
No. 3. "An approach which does not evidently lead to the house, or which
does not take the shortest course, cannot be right. (This rule must be
taken with certain limitations.) The shortest road across a lawn to a
house will seldom be found graceful, and often vulgar. A road bordered
by trees in the form of an avenue may be straight without being vulgar;
and grandeur, not grace or elegance, is the expression expected to be
produced."
No. 4. "A poor man's cottage, divided into what is called a _pair of
lodges_, is a mistaken expedient to mark importance in the entrance to a
park."
No. 5. "The entrance-gate should not be visible from the mansion, unless
it opens into a courtyard."
No. 6. "The plantation surrounding a place called a _Belt_ I have never
advised; nor have I ever willingly marked a drive, or walk, completely
round the verge of a park, except in small villas, where a dry path
round a person's own field is always more interesting than any other
walk."
No 7. "Small plantations of trees, surrounded by a fence, are the best
expedients to form groups, because trees planted singly seldom grow
well; neglect of thinning and removing the fence has produced that ugly
deformity called a _Clump_."
No. 8. "Water on a eminence, or on the side of a hill, is among the most
common errors of Mr Brown's followers; in numerous instances I have been
allowed to remove such pieces of water from the hills to the valleys,
but in many my advice has not prevailed."
No. 9. "Deception may be allowable in imitating the works of Nature.
Thus artificial rivers, lakes, and rock scenery can only be great by
deception, and the mind acquiesces in the fraud after it is detected,
but in works of Art every trick ought to be avoided. Sham churches, sham
ruins, sham bridges, and everything which appears what it is not,
disgusts when the trick is discovered."
No. 10. "In buildings of every kind the _character_ should be strictly
observed. No incongruous mixture can be justified. To add Grecian to
Gothic, or Gothic to Grecian, is equally absurd; and a sharp pointed
arch to a garden gate or a dairy window, however frequently it occurs,
is not less offensive than Grecian architecture, in which the standard
rules of relative proportion are neglected or violated."
The perfection of landscape-gardening consists in the fullest attention
to these principles, _Utility_, _Proportion_, and _Unity_, or harmony of
parts to the whole. (Repton, "Landscape Gardening," pp. 128-9.)
The best advice one can give to a young gardener is--_know your Repton_.
The writings of the new school of gardening, of which Repton is a
notable personage in its later phase, are not, however, on a par with
the writings of the old traditional school, either as pleasant garden
literature, or in regard to broad human interest or artistic quality.
They are hard and critical, and never lose the savour of the heated air
of controversy in which they were penned. Indeed, I can think of no more
sure and certain cure for a bad attack of garden-mania--nothing that
will sooner wipe the bloom off your enjoyment of natural beauty--than a
course of reading from the Classics of Landscape-garden literature! "I
only sound the clarion," said the urbane master-gardener of an earlier
day, "but I enter not into the battle." But these are at one another's
throats! Who enters here must leave his dreams of fine gardening behind,
for he will find himself in a chilly, disenchanted world, with nothing
more romantic to feed his imagination upon than "Remarks on the genius
of the late Mr. Brown," Critical enquiries, Observations on taste,
Difference between landscape gardening and painting, Price upon Repton,
Repton upon Price, Repton upon Knight, further answers to Messrs Price
and Knight, &c. But all this is desperately dull reading, hurtful to
one's imagination, fatal to garden-fervour.[32] And naturally so, for
analysis of the processes of garden-craft carried too far begets loss of
faith in all. Analysis is a kill-joy, destructive of dreams of beauty.
"We murder to dissect." That was a true word of the cynic of that day,
who summed up current controversy upon gardening in the opinion that
"the works of Nature were well executed, but in a bad taste." The
quidnuncs' books about gardening are about as much calculated to give
one delight, as the music the child gets out of the strings of an
instrument that it broke for the pride of dissection. Even Addison, with
the daintiest sense and prettiest pen of them all, shows how thoroughly
gardening had lost
... "its happy, country tone,
Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note
Of men contention-tost,"--
as he thrums out his laboured coffee-house conceit. "I think there are
as many kinds of gardening as poetry; your makers of parterres and
flower-gardens are epigrammatists and sonneteers in this art; contrivers
of bowers and grottoes, treillages, and cascades, are Romance writers.
Wise and Loudon are our heroic poets." Nor is his elaborate argument
meant to prove the gross inferiority of Art in a garden to unadorned
Nature more inspiring. Nay, what is one to make of even the logic of
such argument as this? "If the products of Nature rise in value
according as they more or less resemble those of Art, we may be sure
that artificial works receive a greater advantage from their resemblance
of such as are natural." (_Spectator._) But who _does_ apply the
Art-standard to Nature, or value her products as they resemble those of
Art? And has not Sir Walter well said: "Nothing is more the child of Art
than a garden"? And Loudon: "All art, to be acknowledged, as art must be
avowed."
[Footnote 32: A candid friend thus writes to Repton: "You may have
perceived that I am rather _too much_ inclined to the Price and Knight
_party_, and yet I own to you that I have been often so much disgusted
by the affected and technical language of connoisseurship, that I have
been sick of pictures for a month, and almost of Nature, when the same
jargon was applied to her." (Repton, p. 232.)]
One prefers to this cold Pindaric garden-homage the unaffected, direct
delight in the sweets of a garden of an earlier day; to realise with old
Mountaine how your garden shall produce "a jucunditie of minde;" to
think with Bishop Hall, as he gazes at his tulips, "These Flowers are
the true Clients of the Sunne;" to be brought to old Lawson's state of
simple ravishment, "What more delightsome than an infinite varietie of
sweet-smelling flowers? decking with sundry colours the green mantle of
the Earth, colouring not onely the earth, but decking the ayre, and
sweetning every breath and spirit;" to taste the joys of living as,
taking Robert Burton's hand, you "walk amongst orchards, gardens,
bowers, mounts and arbours, artificial wildernesses, green thickets,
groves, lawns, rivulets, fountains, and such like pleasant places,
between wood and water, in a fair meadow, by a river side, to disport in
some pleasant plain or park, must needs be a delectable recreation;" to
be inoculated with old Gerarde of the garden-mania as he bursts forth,
"Go forward in the name of God: graffe, set, plant, nourishe up trees in
every corner of your grounde;" to trace with Temple the lines and
features that go to make the witchery of the garden at Moor Park, "in
all kinds the most beautiful and perfect, at least in the Figure and
Disposition, that I have ever seen," and which you may follow if you are
not "above the Regards of Common Expence;" to hearken to Bacon expatiate
upon the Art which is indeed "the purest of all humane pleasure, the
greatest refreshment to the Spirits of man;" to feel in what he says the
value of an ideal, the magic of a style backed by passion--to have
garden precepts wrapped in pretty metaphors (such as that "because the
Breath of Flowers is far Sweeter in the Air--_where it comes and goes
like the warbling of Musick_--than in the Hand, therefore nothing is
more fit for that Delight than to know what be the Flowers and Plants
that do best perfume the Air;")--to be taught how to order a garden to
suit all the months of the year, and have things of beauty enumerated
according to their seasons--to feel rapture at the sweet-breathing
presence of Art in a garden--to learn from one who knows how to garden
in a grand manner, and yet be finally assured that beauty does not
require a great stage, that the things thrown in "for state and
magnificence" are but nothing to the true pleasure of a garden--this is
garden-literature worth reading!
Compared with the frank raptures of such writings as these, the
laboured treatises of the landscape-school are but petty hagglings over
the mint and cummin of things. You go to the writings of the masters of
the old formality, to come away invigorated as by a whiff of mountain
air straight off Helicon; they shall give one fresh enthusiasm for
Nature, fresh devotion to Art, fresh love for beautiful things. But from
the other--
"The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I"--
they deal with technicalities in the affected language of
connoisseurship; they reveal a disenchanted world, a world of exploded
hopes given over to the navvies and the critics; and it is no wonder
that writings so prompted should have no charm for posterity; charm they
never had. They are dry as summer dust.
For the honour of English gardening, and before closing this chapter, I
would like to recall that betweenity--the garden of the transition--done
at the very beginning of the century of revolution, which unites
something of the spirit of the old and of the new schools. Here is Sir
Walter Scott's report of the Kelso garden as he _first_ knew it, and
_after_ it had been mauled by the landscape-gardener. It was a garden of
seven or eight acres adjacent to the house of an ancient maiden lady:
"It was full of long straight walks between hedges of yew and
hornbeam, which rose tall and close on every side. There were
thickets of flowering shrubs, a bower, and an arbour, to which
access was obtained through a little maze of contorted walks,
calling itself a labyrinth. In the centre of the bower was a
splendid Platanus or Oriental plane, a huge hill of leaves, one of
the noblest specimens of that regularly beautiful tree which we
remember to have seen. In different parts of the garden were fine
ornamental trees which had attained great size, and the orchard was
filled with fruit-trees of the best description. There were seats
and trellis-walks, and a banqueting-house. Even in our time this
little scene, intended to present a formal exhibition of vegetable
beauty, was going fast to decay. The parterres of flowers were no
longer watched by the quiet and simple _friends_ under whose
auspices they had been planted, and much of the ornament of the
domain had been neglected or destroyed to increase its productive
value. We visited it lately, after an absence of many years. Its
air of retreat, the seclusion which its alleys afforded was gone;
the huge Platanus had died, like most of its kind, in the beginning
of this century; the hedges were cut down, the trees stubbed up,
and the whole character of the place so much destroyed that I was
glad when I could leave it."--("Essay on Landscape Gardening,"
_Quarterly Review_, 1828.[33])
[Footnote 33: "The Praise of Gardens," pp. 185-6.]
Another garden, of later date than this at Kelso, and somewhat less
artistic, is that described by Mr Henry A. Bright in "The English Flower
Garden."[34]
"One of the most beautiful gardens I ever knew depended almost
entirely on the arrangement of its lawns and shrubberies. It had
certainly been most carefully and adroitly planned, and it had
every advantage in the soft climate of the West of England. The
various lawns were divided by thick shrubberies, so that you
wandered on from one to the other, and always came on something
new. In front of these shrubberies was a large margin of
flower-border, gay with the most effective plants and annuals. At
the corner of the lawn a standard _Magnolia grandiflora_ of great
size held up its chaliced blossoms; at another a tulip-tree was
laden with hundreds of yellow flowers. Here a magnificent
_Salisburia_ mocked the foliage of the maiden-hair; and here an old
cedar swept the grass with its large pendent branches. But the main
breadth of each lawn was never destroyed, and past them you might
see the reaches of a river, now in one aspect, now in another. Each
view was different, and each was a fresh enjoyment and surprise.
"A few years ago and I revisited the place; the 'improver' had been
at work, and had been good enough to _open up_ the view.
Shrubberies had disappeared, and lawns had been thrown together.
The pretty peeps among the trees were gone, the long vistas had
become open spaces, and you saw at a glance all that there was to
be seen. Of course the herbaceous borders, which once contained
numberless rare and interesting plants, had disappeared, and the
lawn in front of the house was cut up into little beds of red
pelargoniums, yellow calceolarias, and the rest."
[Footnote 34: _Ibid._, p. 296.]
In this example we miss the condensed beauty and sweet austerities of
the older garden at Kelso: nevertheless, it represents a phase of
workmanship which, for its real insight into the secrets of
garden-beauty, we may well be proud of, and deplore its destruction at
the hands of the landscape-gardener.
All arts are necessarily subject to progression of type. "Man cannot
escape from his time," says Mr Morley, and with changed times come
changed influences. But, then, to _progress_ is not to _change_: "to
progress is to live," and one phase of healthy progression will tread
the heels of that which precedes it. The restless changeful methods of
modern gardening are, however, not to be ascribed to the healthy
development of one consistent movement, but to chaos--to the revolution
that ensued upon the overthrow of tradition--to the indeterminateness of
men who have no guiding principles, who take so many wild leaps in the
dark, in the course of which, rival champions jostle one another and
only the fittest survives.
In treating of Modern English Gardening, it is difficult to make our way
along the tortuous path of change, development it is not, that set in
with the banishment of Art in a garden. Critical writers have done their
best to unravel things, to find the relation of each fractured phase,
and to give each phase a descriptive name, but there are still many
unexplained points, many contradictions that are unsolved, to which I
have already alluded.
Loudon's Introduction to Repton's "Landscape Gardening" gives perhaps
the most intelligible account of the whole matter. The art of laying out
grounds has been displayed in two very distinct styles: the first of
which is called the "Ancient Roman, Geometric, Regular, or Architectural
Style; and the second the Modern, _English_,[35] Irregular, Natural, or
Landscape Style."
[Footnote 35: This is a little unpatriotic of Loudon to imply that the
_English_ had no garden-style till the 18th century, but one can stand a
great deal from Loudon.]
We have, he says, the Italian, the French, and the Dutch Schools of the
Geometric Style. The Modern, or Landscape Style, when it first displayed
itself in English country residences, was distinctly marked by the
absence of everything that had the appearance of a terrace, or of
architectural forms, or lines, immediately about the house. The house,
in short, rose abruptly from the lawn, and the general surface of the
ground was characterised by smoothness and bareness. This constituted
the first School of the Landscape Style, introduced by Kent and Brown.
This manner was followed by the romantic or Picturesque Style, which
inaugurates a School which aimed at producing architectural tricks and
devices, allied with scenery of picturesque character and sham
rusticity. The conglomeration at Stowe, albeit that it is attributed to
Kent, shows what man can do in the way of heroically wrong
garden-craft.
To know truly how to lay out a garden "_After a more Grand and Rural
Manner than has been done before_," you cannot do better than get Batty
Langley's "New Principles of Gardening," and among other things you have
rules whereby you may concoct natural extravagances, how you shall prime
prospects, make landscapes that are pictures of nothing and very like;
how to copy hills, valleys, dales, purling streams, rocks, ruins,
grottoes, precipices, amphitheatres, &c.
The writings of Gilpin and Price were effective in undermining Kent's
School; they helped to check the rage for destroying avenues and
terraces, and insisted upon the propriety of uniting a country-house
with the surrounding scenery by architectural appendages. The leakage
from the ranks of Kent's School was not all towards the Picturesque
School, but to what Loudon terms Repton's School, which may be
considered as combining all that was excellent in what had gone before.
Following upon these phases is one that is oddly called the
"_Gardenesque_" Style, the leading feature of which is that it
illustrates the beauty of trees, and other plants _individually_; in
short, it is the _specimen_ style. According to the practice of all
previous phases of modern gardening, trees, shrubs, and flowers were
indiscriminately mixed and crowded together, in shrubberies or other
plantations. According to the Gardenesque School, all the trees and
shrubs are arranged to suit their kinds and dimensions, and to display
them to advantage. The ablest exponents of the school are Loudon in the
recent past, and Messrs Marnock and Robinson in the present, and their
method is based upon Loudon.
To know how to lay out a garden after the most approved modern fashion
we have but to turn to the deservedly popular pages of "The English
Flower Garden." This book contains not only model designs and commended
examples from various existing gardens, but text contributed by some
seventy professional and amateur gardeners. Even the gardener who has
other ideals and larger ambitions than are here expected, heartily
welcomes a book so well stored with modern garden-lore up to date, with
suggestions for new aspects of vegetation, new renderings of plant life,
and must earnestly desire to see any system of gardening made perfect
after its kind--
... "I wish the sun should shine
On all men's fruits and flowers, as well as mine."
Gardening is, above all things, a progressive Art which has never had so
fine a time to display its possibilities as now, if we were only wise
enough to freely employ old experiences and modern opportunities. People
are, however, so readily content with their stereotyped models, with
barren imitations, with their petty list of specimens, when instead of
half-a-dozen kinds of plants, their garden has room for hundreds of
different plants of fine form--hardy or half-hardy, annual and
bulbous--which would equally well suit the British garden and add to its
wealth of beauty by varied colourings in spring, summer, and autumn. At
present "the choke-muddle shrubbery, in which the poor flowering shrubs
dwindle and kill each other, generally supports a few ill-grown and
ill-chosen plants, but it is mainly distinguished for wide patches of
bare earth in summer, over which, in better hands, pretty green things
might crowd." The specimen plant has no chance of displaying itself
under such conditions.
* * * * *
Into so nice a subject as the practice of Landscape-gardening of the
present day it is not my intention to enter in detail, and for two good
reasons. In the first place, the doctrines of a sect are best known by
the writings of its representatives; and in this case, happily, both
writings and representatives are plentiful. Secondly, I do not see that
there is much to chronicle. Landscape-gardening is, in a sense, still in
its fumbling stage; it has not increased its resources, or done anything
heroic, even on wrong lines; it has not advanced towards any permanent,
definable system of ornamentation since it began its gyrations in the
last century. Its rival champions still beat the air. Even Repton was
better off than the men of to-day, for he had, at least, his Protestant
formulary of Ten Objections to swear by, which "mark those errors or
absurdities in modern gardening and architecture to which I have never
willingly subscribed" (p. 127, "Theory and Practice of Landscape
Gardening," 1803, quoted in full above).
But the present race of landscape-gardeners are, it strikes me, as much
at sea as ever. True they threw up traditional methods as unworthy, but
they had not learnt their own Art according to Nature before they began
to practise it; and they are still in the throes of education. Their
intentions are admirable beyond telling, but their work exhibits in the
grossest forms the very vices they condemn in the contrary school; for
the expression of their ideas is self-conscious, strained, and
pointless. To know at a glance their position towards Art in a garden,
how crippled their resources, how powerless to design, let me give an
extract from Mr Robinson. He is speaking of an old-fashioned garden,
"One of those classical gardens, the planners of which prided themselves
upon being able to give Nature lessons of good behaviour, to teach her
geometry and the fine Art of irreproachable lines; but Nature abhors
lines;[36] she is for geometers a reluctant pupil, and if she submits to
their tyranny she does it with bad grace, and with the firm resolve to
take eventually her revenge. Man cannot conquer the wildness of her
disposition, and so soon as he is no longer at hand to impose his will,
so soon as he relaxes his care, she destroys his work" (p. viii.,
"English Flower Garden"). This is indeed to concede everything to
Nature, to deny altogether the mission of Art in a garden.
[Footnote 36: For which reason, I suppose, Mr Robinson, in his model
"Non-geometrical Gardens" (p. 5), humbly skirts his ground with a path
which as nearly represents a tortured horse-shoe as Nature would permit;
and his trees he puts in a happy-go-lucky way, and allows them to nearly
obliterate his path at their own sweet will! No wonder he does not fear
Nature's revenge, where is so little Art to destroy!]
And even the School that is rather kinder to Art, more lenient to
tradition, represented by Mr Milner--even he, in his admirable book upon
the "Art and Practice of Landscape Gardening" (1890), is the champion of
Nature, not of Art, in a garden. "Nature still seems to work in
fetters," he says, and he would "form bases for a better practice of the
Art" (p. 4). Again, Nature is the great exemplar that I follow" (p. 8).
They have not got beyond Brown, so far as theory is concerned. "Under
the great leader Brown," writes Repton, with unconscious irony, "or
rather those who patronised his discovery, we were taught that Nature
was to be our only model"--and Brown had his full chance of manipulating
the universe, for "he lived to establish a fashion in gardening, which
might have been expected to endure as long as Nature should exist"; and
yet Repton's work mostly consisted in repairing Brown's errors and in
covering the nakedness of his hungry prospects. So it would seem that
Art has her revenges as well as Nature! "The way of transgressors is
hard!"
The Landscape-gardener, I said, gets no nearer to maturity of purpose as
time runs on. He creeps and shuffles after Nature as at the first--much
as the benighted traveller after the will-o'-the-wisp. He may not lay
hands on her, because you cannot conquer her wildness, nor impose your
will upon her, or teach her good behaviour. He may not apply the "dead
formalism of Art" to her, for "Nature abhors lines." Hence his mimicry
can never rise above Nature. Indeed, if it remains faithful to the
negative opinions of its practitioners, landscape-gardening will never
construct any system of device. It has no creed, if you except that sole
article of its faith, "I believe in the non-geometrical garden." A
monumental style is an impossibility while it eschews all features that
make for state and magnificence and symmetry; a little park scenery,
much grass, curved shrubberies, the "laboured littleness" of emphasised
specimen plants--the hardy ones dotted about in various parts--wriggling
paths, flower-borders, or beds of shapes that imply that they are the
offspring of bad dreams, and its tale of effects is told. But as for
"fine gardening," that was given up long ago as a bad job! The spirit of
Walpole's objections to the heroic enterprise of the old-fashioned
garden still holds the "landscape-gardener" in check. "I should hardly
advise any of those attempts," says Walpole; "_they are adventures of
too hard achievement for any common hands_."
It is not so much at what he finds in the landscape gardener's creations
that the architect demurs, but at what he misses. It is not so much at
what the landscape-gardener recommends that the architect objects, as at
what moving in his own little orbit he wilfully shuts out, basing his
opposition to tradition upon such an _ex parte_ view of the matter as
this--"There are really two styles, one strait-laced, mechanical, with
much wall and stone, or it may be gravel, with much also of such
geometry as the designer of wall-papers excels in--often poorer than
that, with an immoderate supply of spouting water, and with trees in
tubs as an accompaniment, and, perhaps, griffins and endless
plaster-work, and sculpture of the poorer sort." Why "poorer"? "The
other, with _right desire_, though _often awkwardly_ (!) accepting
Nature as a guide, and endeavouring to illustrate in our gardens, _so
far as convenience and knowledge will permit_, her many treasures of the
world of flowers" ("English Flower Garden"). How sweetly doth bunkum
commend itself!
It is not that the architect is small-minded enough to cavil at the
landscape-gardener's right to display his taste by his own methods, but
that he strikes for the same right for himself. It is not that he would
rob the landscape-gardener of the pleasure of expressing his own views
as persuasively as he can, but that he resents that air of superiority
which the other puts on as he bans the comely types and garnered
sweetness of old England's garden, that he accents the proscription of
the ways of interpreting Nature that have won the sanction of lovers of
Art and Nature of all generations of our forefathers, and this from a
School whose prerogative dates no farther back than the discovery of the
well-meaning, clumsy, now dethroned kitchen-gardener, known a short
century since as "the immortal Brown." There is no reviewer so keen as
Time!