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GARDEN DESIGN




BY THE SAME

  ALPINE FLOWERS for English Gardens. Second Edition.

  THE SUB-TROPICAL GARDEN; or, Beauty of Form in the Flower Garden.
    Second Edition.

  HARDY FLOWERS. Description of upwards of 1300 of the most ornamental
    species, with Directions for their Arrangement, Culture, etc. Fourth
    and Cheaper Edition.

  THE WILD GARDEN; or, Our Graves and Gardens made beautiful by the
    Naturalisation of Hardy Exotic Plants. Illustrated by ALFRED PARSONS.
    Second Edition. John Murray.

  THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN: Style, Position, and Arrangement. Followed
    by a Description of all the best Plants for it--their Culture and
    Arrangement. Second Edition, 1889. John Murray.

  GOD'S ACRE BEAUTIFUL; or, The Cemeteries of the Future. Third Edition.
    With Illustrations. London: John Murray. New York: Scribner &
    Welford. Published in a cheaper form and with additions under the
    name--

  CREMATION AND URN-BURIAL. Cassell & Co., Limited.

  THE PARKS AND GARDENS OF PARIS. Considered in Relation to the Wants of
    other Cities, and of Public and Private Gardens. Being notes made in
    Paris Gardens. Third Edition. Illustrated. London: John Murray.


JOURNALS

  THE GARDEN. An Illustrated Weekly Journal of Gardening in all its
    branches. Vol. XL.

  GARDENING ILLUSTRATED. For Town and Country. A Weekly Journal for
    Amateurs and Gardeners. Vol. XIII.

  FARM AND HOME. A Weekly Illustrated Journal of Agriculture in all its
    branches. Stock, Dairy, Tillage, Stable, Pasture, Orchard,
    Market-Garden, Poultry, House. Vol. X.

  WOODS AND FORESTS. A Weekly Illustrated Journal of Forestry, Ornamental
    Planting, and Estate Management. Vols. I. and II. 1885.




GARDEN DESIGN
AND ARCHITECTS' GARDENS

    Two reviews, illustrated, to show, by
    actual examples from British gardens,
    that clipping and aligning trees to make
    them 'harmonise' with architecture is
    barbarous, needless, and inartistic

    by

    W. Robinson, F.L.S.


    London:
    John Murray, Albemarle Street
    1892


    To

    Sir Philip Currie, K.C.B.




PREFACE


  That we might see, eyes were given us; and a tongue to tell accurately
  what we had got to see. It is the alpha and omega of all intellect
  that man has. No poetry, hardly even that of Goethe, is equal to the
  true image of reality--had one eyes to see that.--T. CARLYLE, _Letters
  to Varnhagen Von Ense_.

_The one English thing that has touched the heart of the world is the
English garden. Proof of this we have in such noble gardens as the
English park at Munich, the garden of the Emperor of Austria at
Laxenberg, the Petit Trianon at Versailles, the parks formed of recent
years round Paris, and many lovely gardens in Europe and America. The
good sense of English writers and landscape gardeners refused to accept
as right or reasonable the architect's garden, a thing set out as bricks
and stones are, and the very trees of which were mutilated to meet his
views as to "design" or rather to prove his not being able to see the
simplest elements of design in landscape beauty or natural form. And
some way or other they destroyed nearly all signs of it throughout our
land._

_In every country where gardens are made we see the idea of the
English garden gratefully accepted; and though there are as yet no
effective means of teaching the true art of landscape gardening, we see
many good results in Europe and America. No good means have ever been
devised for the teaching of this delightful English art. Here and there
a man of keen sympathy with Nature does good work, but often it is
carried out by men trained for a very different life, as engineers in
the great Paris parks, and in our own country by surveyors and others
whose training often wholly unfits them for the study of the elements of
beautiful landscape. Thus we do not often see good examples of
picturesque garden and park design, while bad work is common.
Everywhere--unhappily, even in England, the home of landscape
gardening--the too frequent presence of stupid work in landscape
gardening offers some excuse for the two reactionary books which have
lately appeared--books not worth notice for their own sake, as they
contribute nothing to our knowledge of the beautiful art of gardening or
garden design. But so many people suppose that artistic matters are mere
questions of windy argument, that I think it well to show by English
gardens and country seats of to-day that the many sweeping statements of
their authors may be disproved by reference to actual things, to be seen
by all who care for them. We live at a time when, through complexity of
thought and speech, artistic questions have got into a maze of
confusion. Even teachers by profession confuse themselves and their
unfortunate pupils with vague and hyper-refined talk about art and
"schools" and "styles," while all the time much worse work is done than
in days when simpler, clearer views were held. To prove this there is
the example of the great Master's work and the eternal laws of nature,
on the study of which all serious art must be for ever based. Beneath
all art there are laws, however subtle, that cannot be ignored without
error and waste; and in garden design there are lessons innumerable both
in wild and cultivated Nature which will guide us well if we seek to
understand them simply._

_These books are made up in great part of quotations from old books on
gardening--many of them written by men who knew books better than
gardens. Where the authors touch the ground of actuality, they soon show
little acquaintance with the subject; and, indeed, they see no design at
all in landscape gardening and admit their ignorance of it. That men
should write on things of which they have thought little is unhappily of
frequent occurrence, but to find them openly avowing their ignorance of
the art they presume to criticise is new._

_A word or two on the state of architecture itself may not be amiss.
From Gower Street to the new Law Courts our architecture does not seem
to be in a much better state than landscape gardening is, according to
the architects to whom we owe the "Formal Garden" and "Garden Craft"! It
is William Morris--whose "design" these authors may respect--who calls
London houses "mean and idiotic rabbit warrens:" so that there is plenty
to do for ambitious young architects to set their own house in artistic
order!_

_As regards "formal gardening," the state of some of the best old
houses in England--Longleat, Compton-Wynyates, Brympton, and many
others, where trees in formal lines, clipped or otherwise, are not seen
in connection with the architecture--is proof against the need of the
practice. As regards the best new houses, Clouds, so well built by Mr.
Philip Webb, is not any the worse for its picturesque surroundings,
which do not meet the architect's senseless craving for "order and
balance"; while Batsford, certainly one of the few really good new
houses in England, is not disfigured by the fashions in formality the
authors wish to see revived, and of which they give an absurd example in
a cut of Badminton. There is, in short, ample proof, furnished both by
the beautiful old houses of England and by those new ones that have any
claim to dignity, that the system they seek to revive could only bring
costly ugliness to our beautiful home-landscapes._

                                                               W. R.

  July 1, 1892.




CONTENTS


                                                            PAGE

    GARDEN DESIGN                                              1

    NATURAL AND FALSE LINES                                    5

    "UNCULTIVATED NATURE"                                      8

    THE TRUE LANDSCAPE                                        13

    BUILDINGS IN RELATION TO THE GARDEN                       16

    TIME AND GARDENS                                          20

    TRUE USE OF A GARDEN                                      23

    FORMAL GARDENING                                          25

    "NATURE," AND WHAT WE MEAN BY IT                          31

    "ALL OUR PATHS" ARE CROOKED!                              35

    "THE ONLY GARDEN POSSIBLE!"                               40

    "NO DESIGN IN LANDSCAPE"                                  43

    NO GRASS IN LANDSCAPE GARDENING!                          46

    "IMPROVING" BATTERSEA PARK!                               50

    NATURE AND CLIPPED YEWS                                   53

    NO LINE IN NATURE!                                        62

    "VEGETABLE SCULPTURE"                                     66




ILLUSTRATIONS


    RHIANVA                                To face page        2

    GROUP OF TREES ON GARDEN LAWN AT
    GOLDER'S HILL, HAMPSTEAD                       Page        4

    WAKEHURST                              To face page        6

    GILBERT WHITE'S HOUSE AT SELBORNE           "             10

    EXAMPLE OF FORMAL GARDENING                    Page       12

    LONGLEAT                               To face page       16

    OLD PLACE, LINDFIELD                        "             18

    ARUNDEL CASTLE                              "             20

    TAILPIECE                                      Page       22

    WEST DEAN                              To face page       24

    ATHELHAMPTON HALL, DORSET                   "             26

    THE VICARAGE GARDEN, ODIHAM                 "             30

    UNCLIPPED TREES AT THE LITTLE TRIANON          Page       34

    WESTONBIRT                             To face page       36

    THRUMPTON HALL                              "             40

    TAILPIECE                                      Page       45

    GOODWOOD                               To face page       46

    AVENUE IN PARIS                             "             50

    CLIPPED TREES AT THE LITTLE TRIANON            Page       52

    THE "GRANGE," HARTLEY WINTNEY          To face page       54

    A YEW TREE ON MOUNTAIN, N. ENGLAND          "             56

    BUILDING IN PARIS                           "             58

    BROADLANDS, HANTS                           "             64

    WARREN HOUSE, COOMBE WOOD                   "             66

    DRUMMOND CASTLE                             "             68

    MADRESFIELD                                 "             70

    TAILPIECE                                      Page       73




  "The number of those who really think seriously before they begin
  to write is small; extremely few of them think about _the subject
  itself;_ the remainder think only about the books that have been
  written on it."--ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER.




GARDEN DESIGN[1]

[1] _The Formal Garden in England._ By Reginald Blomfield and F. Inigo
Thomas. London: Macmillan and Co.


A beautiful house in a fair landscape is the most delightful scene of
the cultivated earth--all the more so if there be an artistic
garden--the rarest thing to find! The union--a happy marriage it should
be--between the house beautiful and the ground near it is worthy of more
thought than it has had in the past, and the best ways of effecting that
union artistically should interest men more and more as our cities grow
larger and our lovely English landscape shrinks back from them. The
views of old writers will help us little, for a wholly different state
of things has arisen in these mechanical days. My own view is that we
have never yet got from the garden, and, above all, the home landscape,
half the beauty which we may get by abolishing the needless formality
and geometry which disfigure so many gardens, both as regards plan and
flower planting. Formality is often essential in the plan of a flower
garden near a house--_never_ as regards the arrangements of its flowers
or shrubs. To array these in lines or rings or patterns can only be ugly
wherever done!

That men have never yet generally enjoyed the beauty that good garden
design may give is clear from the fact that the painter is driven from
the garden! The artist dislikes the common garden with its formality and
bedding; he cannot help hating it! In a country place he will seek
anything but the garden, but may, perhaps, be found near a wild Rose
tossing over the pigsty. This dislike is natural and right, as from most
flower gardens the possibility of any beautiful result is shut out! Yet
the beautiful garden exists, and there are numbers of cottage gardens in
Surrey or Kent that are as "paintable" as any bit of pure landscape!

[Illustration: _Rhianva. Terraced garden, but with picturesque planting
and flower gardening_]

Why is the cottage garden often a picture, and the gentleman's garden
near, wholly shut out of the realm of art, a thing which an artist
cannot look at long? It is the absence of pretentious "plan" in the
cottage garden which lets the flowers tell their tale direct; the simple
walks going where they are wanted; flowers not set in patterns; the
walls and porch alive with flowers. Can the gentleman's garden then,
too, be a picture? Certainly; the greater the breadth and means the
better the picture should be. But never if our formal "decorative" style
of design is kept to. Reform must come by letting Nature take her just
place in the garden.

[Illustration: _Group of trees on garden lawn at Golder's Hill,
Hampstead; picturesque effect in suburban garden_]




NATURAL AND FALSE LINES


After we have settled the essential approaches, levels, and enclosures
for shelter, privacy, or dividing lines around a house, the natural form
or lines of the earth herself are in nearly all cases the best to
follow, and in my work I face any labour to get the ground back into its
natural level or fall where disfigured by ugly banks, lines, or angles.

In the true Italian garden on the hills we have to alter the natural
line of the earth or "terrace" it, because we cannot otherwise cultivate
the ground or move at ease upon it. Such steep ground exists in many
countries, and where it does, a like plan must be followed. The strictly
formal in such ground is as right in its way as the lawn in a garden in
the Thames valley. But the lawn is the heart of the true English garden,
and as essential as the terrace is to the gardens on the steep hills.
English lawns have too often been destroyed that "geometrical" gardens
may be made where they are not only needless, but harmful both to the
garden and home landscape. Sometimes on level ground the terrace walls
cut off the view of the landscape from the house, and, on the other
hand, the house from the landscape!

I hold that it is possible to get every charm of a garden and every
use of a country-seat without sacrifice of the picturesque or beautiful;
that there is no reason why, either in the working or design of gardens,
there should be a single false line in them. By this I mean hard and
ugly lines such as the earth never follows, as say, to mention a place
known to many, the banks about the head of the lake in the Bois de
Boulogne. These lines are seen in all bad landscape work, though with
good workmen I find it is as easy to form true and artistic lines as
false and ugly ones. Every landscape painter or observer of landscape
will know what is meant here, though I fear it is far beyond the limits
of the ideas of design held by the authors of the _Formal Garden_. Also,
that every charm of the flower garden may be secured by avoiding wholly
the knots and scrolls which make all the plants and flowers of a garden,
all its joy and life, subordinate to the wretched conventional design in
which they are "set out." The true way is the opposite. We should see
the flowers and feel the beauty of plant forms, with only the simplest
possible plans to ensure good working, to secure every scrap of turf
wanted for play or lawn, and for every enjoyment of a garden.

[Illustration: _Wakehurst. Elizabethan house with grounds not terraced_]




"UNCULTIVATED NATURE"


Such views I have urged, and carry them out when I can, in the hope of
bringing gardening into a line with art, from which it is now so often
divorced. It is natural that these views should meet with some
opposition, and the consideration of the _Formal Garden_ gives the
opportunity of examining their value.

  The question, briefly stated, is this: Are we, in laying out our
  gardens, to ignore the house, and to reproduce uncultivated Nature to
  the best of our ability in the garden? Or are we to treat the house
  and garden as inseparable factors in one homogeneous whole, which are
  to co-operate for one premeditated result?

No sane person has ever proposed to ignore the house. So far from
ignoring the house in my own work, where there is a beautiful house it
tells me what to do! Unhappily, the house is often so bad that nothing
can prevent its evil effect on the garden. "_Reproducing uncultivated
Nature_" is no part of good gardening, as the whole reason of a flower
garden is that it is a home for cultivated Nature. It is the special
charm of the garden that we may have beautiful natural objects in their
living beauty in it, but we cannot do this without care and culture to
begin with! Whether it be Atlas Cedar or Eastern Cypress, Lily-tree or
American Mountain Laurel, all must be cared for at first, and we must
know their ways of life and growth if we are to treat them so that they
will both grow well and be rightly placed--an essential point. And the
more precious and rare they are the better the place they should have in
the flower garden proper or pleasure ground,--places always the object
of a certain essential amount of care even under the simplest and wisest
plans. If we wish to encourage "uncultivated Nature" it must surely be a
little further afield! A wretched flowerless pinched bedding plant and a
great yellow climbing Tea Rose are both cultivated things, but what a
vast difference in their beauty! There are many kinds of "cultivated
Nature," and every degree of ugliness among them.

  Sir C. Barry's idea was that the garden was gradually to become less
  and less formal till it melted away into the park. Compromises such as
  these, however, will be rejected by thoroughgoing adherents of the
  formal gardens who hold that the garden should be avowedly separated
  from the adjacent country by a clean boundary line, a good high wall
  for choice. (_The Formal Garden._)

Would any one put this high wall in front of Gilbert White's house at
Selborne, or of Golder's Hill at Hampstead, or many English houses where
the erection of a high wall would cut off the landscape? Not a word
about the vast variety of such situations, each of which would require
to be treated in a way quite different from the rest! There are many
places in every county that would be robbed of their best charms by
separating the garden from the adjacent country by a "good high wall."

[Illustration: _Gilbert White's house at Selborne. Example of many
gardens with lawn coming to windows and flowers on its margin_]

  The custom of planting avenues and cutting straight lines through the
  woods surrounding the house to radiate in all directions was a
  departure from that strictly logical system which separated the garden
  from the park, and left the latter to take care of itself, a system
  which frankly subordinated Nature to art within the garden wall, but
  in return gave Nature an absolutely free hand outside it. (_The Formal
  Garden._)

Nature an "_absolutely free hand_"! Imagine a great park or any part of
an estate being left to Nature with an "absolutely free hand"! If it
were, in a generation there would be very little to see but the edge of
the wood. Callous to the beauty of English parks, he does not know that
they are the object of much care, and he abuses all those who ever
formed them, Brown, Repton, and the rest.

[Illustration: _Example of formal gardening, with clipped trees and
clipped shrubs in costly tubs_]




THE TRUE LANDSCAPE


Mr. Blomfield writes nonsense, and then attributes it to me--

  that is to say, we go to Claude, and having saturated our minds with
  his rocks and trees, we return to Nature and try to worry her into a
  resemblance to Claude.

I am never concerned with Claude, but seek the best expression I can
secure of our beautiful English real landscapes, which are far finer
than Claude's. At least I never saw any painted landscape like them--say
that from the Chestnut Walk at Shrubland, looking over the lovely
Suffolk country. That is the precious heritage we have to keep. And that
is where simple and picturesque gardening will help us by making the
garden a beautiful foreground for the true landscape, instead of cutting
it off with a "high wall" or anything else that is ugly and needless.

  The lawns are not to be left in broad expanse, but to have Pampas
  Grasses, foreign shrubs, etc., dotted about on the surface.

I have fought for years against the lawn-destruction by the
terrace-builders and bedding-out gardeners! But how are we to have our
lawns in "broad expanse" if we build a high wall near the house to cut
off even the possibility of a lawn? This has been done in too many cases
to the ruin of all good effect and repose, often to shut out as good
landscapes as ever were painted! There are flagrant cases in point to be
found in private gardens in the suburbs of London. There is much bad and
ignorant landscape work as there is bad building everywhere, but errors
in that way are more easily removed than mistakes in costly and aimless
work in brick and stone. At Coombe Cottage, when I first saw its useless
terrace wall shutting out the beautiful valley view from the living
rooms, I spoke of the error that had been made, but the owner thought
that, as it had cost him a thousand pounds, he had better leave it where
it was!




BUILDINGS IN RELATION TO THE GARDEN


The place of formal gardening is clear for ever. The architect can help
the gardener much by building a beautiful house! That is his work. The
true architect, it seems to me, would seek to go no farther. The better
the real work of the architect is done, the better for the garden and
landscape. If there are any difficulties of level about the house
beautiful, they should be dealt with by the architect, and the better
his work and the necessary terracing, if any, are done, the pleasanter
the work of the landscape or other gardener who has to follow him should
be.

[Illustration: _Longleat. Type of nobler English country seat with old
house and picturesque planting_]

That a garden is made for plants is what most people who care for
gardens suppose. If a garden has any use, it is to treasure for us
beautiful flowers, shrubs, and trees. In these days--when our ways of
building are the laughing-stock of all who care for beautiful
buildings--there is plenty for the architect to do without spoiling our
gardens! Most of the houses built in our time are so bad, that even the
best gardening could hardly save them from contempt. Our garden flora is
now so large, that a life's work is almost necessary to know it. How is
a man to make gardens wisely if he does not know what has to be grown in
them? I do not mean that we are to exclude other men than the landscape
gardener proper from the garden. We want all the help we can get from
those whose tastes and training enable them to help us--the landscape
painter best of all, if he cares for gardens and trees--the country
gentleman, or any keen student and lover of Nature. The landscape
gardener of the present day is not always what we admire, his work often
looking more like that of an engineer. His gardening near the house is
usually a repetition of the decorative work of the house, of which I
hope many artistic people are already tired. And as I think people will
eventually see the evil and the wastefulness of this "decorative" stuff,
and spend their money on really beautiful and artistic things, so I
think the same often-repeated "knots" and frivolous patterns must leave
the artistic garden, and simpler and dignified forms take their place.

To endeavour to apply any one preconceived plan or general idea to
every site is folly, and the source of many blunders. The authors are
not blind to the absurdities of the architectural gardeners, and say, on
page 232:--

  Rows of statues were introduced from the French, costly architecture
  superseded the simple terrace, intricate parterres were laid out from
  gardeners' pattern books, and meanwhile the flowers were forgotten. It
  was well that all this pomp should be swept away. We do not want this
  extravagant statuary, these absurdities in clipped work, this
  aggressive prodigality. But though one would admit that in its decay
  the formal garden became unmanageable and absurd, the abuse is no
  argument against the use.

Certainly not where the place calls for it, and all absolutely
necessary stone-work about a house should be controlled by the
architect; beyond that, nothing. To let him lay out our home landscapes
again with lines of trees, as shown in the old Dutch books, and with no
regard to landscape design and to the relations of the garden to the
surrounding country, would be the greatest evil that could come to the
beautiful home landscapes of Britain.

[Illustration: _Old