The English Garden
BY The Editors of Phaidon Press
Phaidon Press
ISBN: 978 0 7148 4892 1
One should not call a garden "English" without specifying the century or the designer's name attached to it. Each age brought its own interpretation to the landscape surrounding the proverbial English manor. This publication, which is encyclopedic in its coverage of English gardens, teaches us that every landowner asked something different from his landscape designer. Furthermore, what comes to mind as a traditional English garden may be English in origin but is certainly not what some of us might call a "garden".
What the English call gardens is what North Americans call estates or parks. These are not back yard venues. They were, for the most part, until the latter half of the twentieth century, vast landscaped acreages. Sometimes the contours of these terrains were sculpted into the vision of the landscaper and sometimes they respected the natural formations of the land. In either case, landowners had the necessary wealth to modify nature, if they so wished. That is a revealing factor that is often overlooked.
In olden times, a garden might be a large cow- grazing pasture whose borders began at the foundations of an elaborate country manor and extended for several acres, or it might be a messy cottage garden, filled with edible crops and herbs, growing outside the kitchen door of an otherwise elaborate estate, and filled with flowering plants whose purpose was never intended to be aesthetic. In another instance, a garden might consist of intricate geometric shapes sprinkled, maze like, on the expansive grounds of a stately home, purely decorative in essence, but otherwise very impressive not only for the expense required to create it but also for the high cost of its maintenance.
While there is a disconnect between today's modest weekend gardener who can only admire the gardens in this book and the land owner who can afford to replicate them, there are some lessons that all of us can learn from this historical overview. The easiest to inspire are those gardens that have been created from the late nineteenth century onwards. From Munstead Wood designed by Gertrude Jekyll we learn about impressionist floral landscapes "painted" in romantic color schemes. More recent designers such a Piet Oudolf, Beth Chatto and Tom Stuart-Smith have taken a modern approach and have used plants to create powerful abstract paintings that move across meadow and lawn. These landscapers , working in the latter half of the twentieth century, reflect contemporary values about color combinations that would have been considered visually dissonant fifty years earlier.
While most of the landscapers in this book are worthy of mention, two deserve special attention One is the late Dame Miriam Rothschild, who converted her neat estate into a wildflower meadow and invented, along the way, a popular wild flower seed mix called Farmer's Nightmare! The other landscaper of note is Tim Smit who discovered an overgrown garden at Heligan, which had been neglected for over a hundred years. Rather than restore it, he cut through some of the growth to barely expose a beautiful, but haunting, `lost' garden which he successfully converted into a tree hugger's destination.
It is inspiring for the suburban gardener to learn that world class garden designers working in Britain today are also designing back yard gardens for small spaces. Their utilitarian value, as an oasis within the inner city and as a venue to entertain guests, has inspire some designers to include furniture, and to introduce rock and metal into these mini landscapes. Often, dramatic lighting is incorporated, as well, to reflect the fashion of entertaining outdoors, after dark.
While this is ostensibly, a picture book, it is also, by inference, a socioeconomic survey of English society. The text that accompanies each illustration, offers a cameo of the age in which each garden was created. This is an added bonus, easily overlooked by the reader who might chose only to admire the photographs. I, for one, was delighted to read the text as I gained some insight into the mind set of the landowners that commissioned the gardens and the landscapers that created them. These historical footnotes to the pictures enrich the book and make for a fascinating read.
When I began reviewing gardening books, I assumed that there was no need to cover the works of the romantic gardeners of the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries who, up until recently, have been so influential in shaping our tastes in garden design. So much has been written about them, that there didn't seem to be anything left to say. However, by placing them into an historical perspective, as the editors of this book have done, we gain a greater appreciation for their role. And, by juxtaposing them with contemporary modernists, who speak to us in a more current voice, we come to appreciate the radical evolution in garden design that is taking place in our lifetime.
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Top reviews from other countries
D. Dannenmann
Eine interessante, andere Darstellung von Darwins Leben
Reviewed in Germany on April 8, 2013Daniel Weiß
Für die Menschen, die die Biografien weiser Menschen lieben
Reviewed in Germany on May 28, 2019