Writing the Garden. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
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Blomfield puts forth a spirited defense against what he considers to be Robinson’s fallacious, intemperate, and untenable charges, made after the publication of the first edition. With considerable invective Robinson had taken issue with Blomfield’s recommendations for a return to formality, and here it is Blomfield’s turn to aim a few angry verbal arrows at Robinson. Heatedly, he rebuts Robinson’s sarcastic barbs, accusing him of willful misinterpretation and ignorance of garden making as a form of art:
Mr. Robinson neither gives us the definition, nor shows us where the art is or what it consists of. The trees are beautiful, and so are the flowers, but where is Mr. Robinson’s art? What does it do for us, or for the trees or the flowers? His skill as a tree-planter, or as a flower-grower, is no doubt great, but that does not make him an artist, and by no possible wrestling of the term can he be called so on this ground only.
Blomfield maintained, “The formal treatment of gardens ought, perhaps, to be called the architectural treatment of gardens, for it consists in the extension of the principles of design which govern the house to the grounds which surround it.” Discriminating between the two views of gardening—the formal and the naturalistic—he argues:
The formal school insists upon design; the house and the grounds should be designed together and in relation to each other; no attempt should be made to conceal the design of the garden, there being no reason for doing so, but the bounding lines, whether it is the garden wall or the lines of paths and parterres, should be shown frankly and unreservedly, and the garden treated specifically as an enclosed space to be laid out exactly as the designer pleases.
He strongly refutes the notion that the landscape gardener has a monopoly on nature:
The clipped yew-tree is as much a part of nature—that is, subject to natural laws—as a forest oak; but the landscapist, by appealing to associations which surround the personification of nature, holds the clipped yew-tree to obloquy as something against nature. Again “nature” is said to prefer a curved line to a straight, and it is thence inferred that all the lines in a garden, and especially paths, should be curved. Now as a matter of fact in nature—that is, in the visible phenomena of the earth’s surface—there are no lines at all; “a line” is simply an abstraction which conveniently expresses the direction of a succession of objects which may be either straight or curved. “Nature” has nothing to do with either straight lines or curved; it is simply begging the question to lay it down as an axiom that curved lines are more “natural” than straight.
For Blomfield, it was not the Italian style of formal gardening that was instructive for contemporary gardeners; rather it was the old gardens of England that had not succumbed to the fashion for Baroque ornamentation or, subsequently, the Picturesque. Nor did formality imply a great expanse as in the French garden, for “some of the best examples of [the English garden] are on a comparatively small scale.” However, Blomfield does not merely sing the praises of old English formal gardens. With an architect’s eye for composition and detail, he criticizes these as well as the later gardens designed in the Picturesque style, his principal objects of censure. He maintains that the white marble statues of Bacchus and Flora at Wilton were a mistake: “To attain its full effect [marble] wants strong sunlight, a clear dry light, and a cloudless sky. In the soft light and nebulous atmosphere of the north marble looks forlorn and out of place.” An integrated overall plan is what counts most, so in discussing public parks he comes down hard on “the spasmodic futility” of Battersea Park where, without a dominant idea controlling the general scheme, “merely to introduce so many statues or plaster casts is to begin at the wrong end. These are the accidents of the system, not the system itself.”
Blomfield is united with Robinson, however unintentionally, in despising the Gardenesque style and the gardener who would have the specimen dahlia banish the hollyhock and other simple, old-fashioned flowers. He equally hates plants in beds that “make the lawn hideous with patches of brilliant red varied by streaks of purple blue.” Taking sarcastic aim at the Victorian head gardener, he asks, “Would he plant them in patterns of stars and lozenges and tadpoles? Would he border them with paths of asphalt? Would he not rather fill his borders with every kind of beautiful flower that he might delight in, and set them off with grass and pleasant green?”
In Blomfield’s mind, the desired relationship between the architect and the horticulturist should not end in a standoff, nor would it, if their responsibilities were divided thusly: “The designer, whether professional or amateur, should lay down the main lines and deal with the garden as a whole, but the execution, such as the best method of forming beds, laying turf, planting trees, and pruning hedges, should be left to the gardener, whose proper business it is.”
In this regard, it is worth noting that Gertrude Jekyll achieved some of her most notable gardens in collaboration with the architect Edwin Lutyens. Their sympathetic marriage of brick terracing and hedge-enclosed garden spaces created an Arts and Crafts landscape idiom that influenced Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson at Sissinghurst and many other gardeners up to the present day. Providing an architectural frame uniting house and garden and giving structure to seasonal borders of sophisticated horticultural artistry, this type of design might be viewed as a synthesis of Robinson and Blomfield. The harmonizing of their opposing but ultimately complementary theories resulted in a style that made a virtue of formal structure as a foil for loosely composed “garden pictures.” In this way these important late-nineteenth-century garden writers can be said to have assisted in the redirection of English garden style at a critical time when vast estate grounds were beginning to become a thing of the past.
Watercolor by Childe Hassam. Frontispiece, An Island Garden by Celia Thaxter, 1895. Collection of The New York Society Library.
Rhapsodists in the Garden
Paradise is a synonym for garden, and the garden is often a paradise in the minds of those whose happiest hours are spent in one. In the case of certain garden writers this is a state that gives rise to ecstatic description. Theirs is a passion we experience with vicarious enthusiasm, an infectious rapture that makes us believe that gardeners are perhaps the happiest of all mortals.
Celia Thaxter
Celia Thaxter (1835–1894) spent almost her entire life on the coast of Maine where her father, Thomas Laighton, was a lighthouse keeper. After her marriage at the age of fifteen, she and her husband, Levi Thaxter, ran Laighton’s summer hotel, Appledore House, on one of the Isles of Shoals; and it was here that she created and cultivated with a never-flagging passion the garden she describes in An Island Garden (1895). Although Thaxter thought of herself primarily as a poet and was certainly a prolific one, her verse has not stood the test of time very well. This much-loved book, however, is an enduring classic.
Each spring, after spreading rich barnyard compost on top of the thin soil of Appledore’s rocky bluffs, Thaxter planted a garden. Only fifteen by fifty feet in size with nine geometrical flower beds, its profusion of summer annuals, propagated from seed in her winter home on the mainland, gave it a riotous grandeur. This fecund display is matched by Thaxter’s prose, which often verges on the euphoric.
Because of her childhood love affair with plants and nature, Thaxter found her gardener’s destiny early in life. Her book, like Jekyll’s Wood and Garden, recounts a formative story, when as a “lonely child living on a lighthouse island ten miles away from the mainland, every blade that sprang out of the ground, every humblest weed, was precious in my sight, and I began a little garden when not more than five years old.” Thaxter was hardly a lonely woman, however, for Appledore Hotel, where she presided as hostess, served for many years as a popular New England artists’ and writers’ summer colony. The guests included such luminaries as Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, Longfellow, William Morris Hunt, and Childe Hassam, whose watercolor paintings of Thaxter’s garden were reproduced as chromolithograph illustrations in An Island Garden.
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