as vignettes, small scenes of beauty that the eye takes in as discrete discoveries rather than as panoramic scenery. Jekyll’s carefully positioned camera framed many charming, seasonal vignettes within Munstead Wood, and in The Wild Garden, Alfred Parsons’s engravings give graphic expression to Robinson’s words, which are never themselves lacking in descriptive power. This does not mean, however, that such garden pictures, whether verbal or illustrational, should be considered as so many floral incidents independent of the overall landscape composition. Rather, the term is intended to imply that gardening is fundamentally an art form in which composition, color, line, and texture are as important as botanical knowledege and horticultural expertise.
Marshaling his arguments in favor of wild gardening, Robinson points out:
Hundreds of the finest flowers will thrive much better in rough places than ever they did in the old-fashioned border; . . . look infinitely better than they ever did in formal beds; . . . [have] no disagreeable effects resulting from decay; . . . enable us to grow many plants that have never yet obtained a place in our ‘trim gardens’; [and] settle the question of the spring flower garden [since] we may cease the dreadful practice of tearing up the flower-beds and leaving them like new-dug graves twice a year. As a final point in its favor, the wild garden can be seen as a kind of paradisiacal reunion of nature’s bounty, for from almost every interesting region the traveler may bring seeds or plants, and establish near his home living souvenirs of the various countries he has visited.
Robinson’s luxuriously produced Gravetye Manor, or Twenty Years’ Work Round an Old Manor House (1911), is both a diary and a narrative of the successive stages of Gravetye’s creation from 1885 through 1908. He tells the reader how he went about felling trees to open up views, removing iron trellises and the kitchen garden abutting the house, eliminating “a mass of rock-work (so-called) of ghastly order,” and destroying other offensive elements left by the previous owners. The book’s beautiful engravings evince the principles put forth in The Wild Garden as Robinson demonstrates Gravetye to be the paradigm in which house, garden, fields, and forest are united in a pastoral work of art as quintessentially English as a painting by Constable.
As attractive as all this may sound, there were some who felt that Robinson’s garden ideal lacked cohesive structure. His peppery personality made it inevitable that he would be attacked by those who disagreed with him, most notably the architect Reginald Blomfield, whose ideas about what a garden should be were quite different.
Reginald Blomfield
The Formal Garden in England (1892) by the country-house architect Reginald Blomfield (1856–1942), with its attractive engravings by F. Inigo Thomas, is a treatise in the form of an essay on English garden history. In the preface to my second-edition copy 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
